Kangana Ranaut takes dig at Priyanka Chopra over her statement on pay gap: ‘A-listers do films for free… only I get paid like male actors’

One of the first stars to openly address and criticise nepotism in Bollywood, while pointing fingers at those who are actively involved in the practice, Kangana has now claimed that only she gets paid like male actors do, while most A-listers “do films for free”.

Kangana Ranaut made the statement, through an Instagram story, while reacting to one of Priyanka Chopra’s interviews with BBC from last year, in which she spoke candidly about the pay gap in Bollywood and how she never got paid the same amount as her male co-actor.

“It’s true women before me simply submitted to these patriarchal norms… I was the first one to fight for pay parity and the most disgusting thing that I faced while doing this was that my contemporaries offered to work for free on the same roles that I was negotiating for… I can say with confidence most A-listers (women) do films for free along with offering other favours because they fear roles will go to the right people… and then shrewdly release articles that they are the highest paid, haha… in the film industry everyone knows that only I get paid like male actors and no one else… and they have no one else to blame at least now,” the Thalaivii actor wrote.

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During the interview, Priyanka Chopra said, “I have never had pay parity in Bollywood. I have done almost 60 movies there, but I have never got paid the same amount as my male co-actor. I would get paid about 10 per cent of my male co-actor. It (the pay gap) is substantially large and so many girls still deal with that.”

“I did think that I was dark-skinned. I did think that I was not pretty enough. I did think that I would have to work a lot harder even though I was probably a little bit more talented than my co-actors who were lighter-skinned. I thought that was right because it was so normalised. I think, as I grew up, I saw things in my career that I didn’t even know were right or wrong and I had to be educated and learn along the way,” she added.

In 2017, while making an appearance on Karan Johar’s Koffee With Karan, Kangana Ranaut called the host the “flag-bearer of nepotism” in Bollywood and also the “movie mafia”.

She told Karan Johar, that he was completely intolerant towards outsiders in the industry and was the flag bearer of nepotism. “So if there is a biopic on Kangana Ranaut, you know Karan will be the antagonist,” she added.