Streaming Salaries

The Crown Gender-Pay Gap Made Netflix Investigate Other Salaries, Too

Netflix went searching for gender-parity issues after The Crown revealed a pay gap between Claire Foy and Matt Smith.
Ted Sarandos Claire Foy and Matt Smith at Netflix's 'The Crown' FYC event in 2017.
Rich Fury/Getty Images.

After Left Bank Pictures revealed Claire Foy earned less for her role on The Crown than co-star Matt Smith, the company said, “Going forward, no one gets paid more than the Queen.” Netflix evidently took that advice to heart.

Speaking at the Makers Conference in California this week, Netflix content chief Ted Sarandos revealed that last year’s controversy prompted a review of cast salaries across all the streamer’s productions, both in-house and third-party. “We were able to find a couple of other ones we were able to adjust,” Sarandos confirmed, without specifying any of the actors or productions with salaries out of alignment.

It was March of 2018 when Left Bank and Crown executive producer Suzanne Mackie confirmed that Smith received a higher salary quote for his two-year commitment than co-star Foy, despite her lead billing, added screen time, and the nature of her role as England’s Queen. Left Bank reportedly corrected the imbalance—even as Foy and Smith’s roles would be taken over by Olivia Colman and Tobias Menzies in Season 3—amid a wave of parity corrections for other high-profile series, such as HBO’s Westworld.

For his part, Sarandos denied having a hand in Foy and Smith’s pay gap, but was nonetheless inspired to take stock. “I can’t comment on her salary, obviously. I wasn’t in charge of it,” Sarandos said during the conference. “But in general there was a disparity. What it did for us was it had us go back and look at all of our productions—and all of our productions that were being run by third parties—and make sure that none of those disparities existed.” Sarandos also mentioned adjusting the salary of an unnamed female executive, given her male counterparts had quoted higher histories for the same position.

The Netflix content head nonetheless deferred to hiring “senior executives who you trust, who look like the world” to keep the company’s representations of diversity on track, rather than committing to any one initiative. “It’s in practice, it isn’t a plaque we hang on the wall,” Sarandos said of lessons learned from the Crown scandal. “It’s something that we do every day. I think that the Claire-Matt issue, as complicated as it is, pointed to a bigger problem throughout the industry.”