By Julie Miller
Julia Roberts may not know who Katniss Everdeen is but the actress is certainly familiar with Jennifer Lawrence, her fellow Oscar-winning actress and America's Sweetheart. And in a new interview, Roberts takes a moment to commend her peer on her courage to pen and publish a recent essay about her personal experience with the gender-based wage gap.
"I applaud her," Roberts tells "Good Morning America" on Wednesday while promoting her latest film, "Secret in Their Eyes." "She's a young, fabulous, talented whippersnapper and I love that she's stirring things up."
She continues, "I mean, she's so energetic and seems to speak her mind, and I think it's great. I think it's great to kind of shake things up. I think it's great to go, 'Excuse me. Over here.' I know something now and I'm frustrated by it and why is this?"
In her essay, Lawrence wrote about being paid less than her male co-stars in "American Hustle", a wage gap that was unearthed in the Sony hacking saga.
When the salary information leaked, Lawrence wrote that, "I didn't get mad at Sony. I got mad at myself. I failed as a negotiator because I gave up early."
The actress also opened up about about sexism on film sets, adding, "I'm over trying to find the 'adorable' way to state my opinion and still be likable! Fuck that. I don't think I've ever worked for a man in charge who spent time contemplating what angle he should use to have his voice heard."
Since Lawrence's essay, her fellow Oscar winner Sandra Bullock has come forward to share the "worst experience" of her career — encountering blatant sexism on an unnamed film she made 10 years ago.
"I found myself yelling and being angry," the actress said. "And I was like, 'What is happening to me?' I was literally fearful. And I realized, it's because I'm female. It dawned on me."
"I was destroyed, because you can't unsee something," Bullock continued. "Was I so naïve up to this point to actually think that I was on an equal level with everybody? It was the way I was being treated, because I was female, versus the way others were being treated."
Bullock adds that, while it's good to open the dialogue about the wage gap, that issue is only an indicator of a larger problem."
"It's a bigger issue than money," the Our Brand Is Crisis star said. "I know we're focused on the money part right now. That's just a byproduct ... Once we start shifting how we perceive women and stop thinking about them as 'less than,' the pay disparity will take care of itself."
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