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The Cards Robin Wright Played to Get Equal Pay

The actress made a Claire Underwood-like power play to get the same pay as Kevin Spacey.

Robin Wright may have learned a thing or two from her character.

The actress, who plays the shrewd First Lady Claire Underwood on “House of Cards,” demanded that Netflix pay her the same amount as her co-star, Kevin Spacey, or she’d tell the world her complaint.

Netflix paid up.

“I was like, ‘I want to be paid the same as Kevin,’” Wright said at a charity event at the Rockefeller Foundation in New York, according to the Huffington Post.

In 2014, Spacey was making $500,000 an episode, while Wright was making $420,000. It was a strange arrangement for two actors whose on-screen personas have very equal power.

"There are very few films or TV shows where the male — the patriarch — and the matriarch are equal. And they are in 'House of Cards,'" Wright told the crowd of journalists and philanthropists.

Not only that, but as Wright pointed out to Netflix, viewers actually liked her character more than Spacey’s at one point.

“I was looking at the statistics, and Claire Underwood's character was more popular than [Frank's] for a period of time. So I capitalized on it. I was like, ‘You better pay me, or I'm going to go public,’” Wright said. “And they did.”

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Nathan Place

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