Jeremy Renner Refused to Help His Female Co-Stars in Negotiating to Get Higher Salaries: "That's Not My Job"

Hollywood is home to American actor Jeremy Renner, who is best known for portraying Hawkeye, a.k.a. Clint Barton, in Marvel Cinematic movies including The Avengers trilogy. Despite his versatility as an actor, he has been involved in his fair share of controversy. Back in 2015, Jennifer Lawrence wrote a contentious essay about the pay gap in Hollywood. The actress stated in the essay that she and Amy Adams, her co-star, received a far less salary than her male co-stars in the film American Hustle. 

Many female actors and actresses, including Sienna Miller, Rooney Mara, and Jessica Chastain, started to open up after this essay, claiming they received lower pay than their male co-stars. Bradley Cooper, who co-starred with Jennifer Lawrence and Amy Adams in the 2013 film American Hustle, was so shocked by Lawrence's article that he went on to start working with his female co-stars to negotiate appropriate compensation before committing to a project. 

But when Renner, who also co-starred in American Hustle, was asked whether he would support this, he said that he wouldn't. Renner said, per Business Insider, "That's not my job. I don't know contracts and money and all that sort of stuff."

According to a Sony email that was obtained later, he did not support his female co-stars even though he was paid more for his role in the movie than Adams and Lawrence were. He added, "I'm a performer, and I know human behavior. When it comes to that sort of stuff, I let other people deal with that. I do what I'm good at, that's what I focus on."

Actors and actresses rarely participate in the negotiations and instead rely on agents, managers, and lawyers to finalize the agreement, and so the majority of the actresses who started the topic of wage inequality have stated that they didn't find out how much more their male actors were paid until after they had already finished shooting the movie.

Lawrence earned $52 million in 2015, making her the highest-paid actress in the world (Robert Downey Jr. earned $80 million), and she claimed in an essay that she discovered the salaries of Cooper, Renner, and the other male actors in American Hustle through emails that were leaked after the Sony hack and that she was upset not only with Sony, the company that released the movie, but also with herself for giving up without negotiating.

"But if I'm honest with myself," she went on to write in the essay, "I would be lying if I didn't say there was an element of wanting to be liked that influenced my decision to close the deal without a real fight."