Chadwick Boseman took money out of his own pocket to boost Sienna Miller’s pay on the set of 21 Bridges, one of the last movies the actor filmed before he died in August of colon cancer.
According to Empire, Boseman—one of the producers on the 2019 thriller—had actively pursued Miller for the role, which she was hesitant to take at first. Miller told the magazine that the offer had come at a time when she exhausted and wasn’t planning on taking on any new projects. She accepted because she wanted to work with Boseman, but she was honest with him about needing equal pay from the production studio to sign on.
That’s when Boseman offered her a cut of his own paycheck, an act of generosity that Miller said speaks to “who he was”:
“I didn’t know whether or not to tell this story, and I haven’t yet. But I am going to tell it, because I think it’s a testament to who he was,” Miller says. “This was a pretty big budget film, and I know that everybody understands about the pay disparity in Hollywood, but I asked for a number that the studio wouldn’t get to. And because I was hesitant to go back to work and my daughter was starting school and it was an inconvenient time, I said, ‘I’ll do it if I’m compensated in the right way.’ And Chadwick ended up donating some of his salary to get me to the number that I had asked for. He said that that was what I deserved to be paid.”
Miller said it’s still “unfathomable” to her that a man in Hollywood would behave so “graciously or respectfully.” She’s been telling other men in the biz to take note.
“There was no showiness,” she said. “It was, ‘Of course I’ll get you to that number, because that’s what you should be paid.’”
On Monday’s episode of Red Table Talk, Willow Smith shared her reaction to hearing her parents speak so candidly about Jada Pinkett-Smith’s erstwhile “entanglement” with singer August Alsina. Jada and husband Will Smith discussed the affair in a July episode of the show, during which time the two hashed out what made Jada pursue a relationship with Alsina, and what was going on in her and Will’s marriage at the time.
It was a lot for everyone to process, but 19-year-old Willow had a very mature response on Monday: “I want to put it on the table. I’m so proud of you. To be able to see you and Dad do that, for me, that was like, ‘OK, that’s the real deal,’” Willow told her mother. “That’s real love.”
It takes most people well into their 20s and 30s to begin to see their parents as other flawed and complicated human beings, but Willow seems to have gotten there much faster—as I suppose might be the case when your parents decide to share the intimate details of their marriage with millions of viewers. [Entertainment Tonight]
- Members of the royal family are reportedly still “wringing their hands” over Harry and Meghan’s recent political statements, which may have violated the couple’s deal with the Queen, aka “Megxit.” [Celebitchy]
- Vanderpump stars Stassi, Lala, and Brittany are pregnant at the same time, and they got together to show off their baby bumps at Brittany and Jax’s gender reveal party over the weekend. Fortunately, this particular gender reveal did not result in an ecological disaster. [Page Six]
- A “mystery man” dumped over a hundred eels in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park on Saturday. (This is very bad.) [Brooklyn Paper]