Patricia Clarkson: ‘When women do wages, everyone wins’ | Patricia Clarkson

Patricia ClarksonThat late equal wages activist Lilly Ledbetter patches up in a biopic that was released this week has a wish.

The Oscar-nominated actor hopes that her co-American women collective sex from their partners, especially men, to the power-as the attack of the second Trump government on diversity, equity and inclusion ever focuses on the win that is won by the subject of her new film.

“Don’t find out here – not because there will be a Lysistata moment,” she recently told the Guardian in an interview, referring to the Ancient Greek Comedy About women who decide to abstain from sex to force the men in their country to stop warfare and sign a peace treaty. “We will turn on chastity tires again.”

Clarkson is just the newest in a long origin to the idea of ​​one sex strike As a protest tactics. However, what the easy A and Sharp Objects -star’s admonition and potential call for action is separate is that it comes when her lead role in Lilly coincides with the first months of a second Donald Trump presidential that is largely marked by the recovery of policy measures that are intended to broaden the professional opportunities.

Directed by Rachel Feldman, Lilly Dramatizes the struggles that are passed by a worker mother from Alabama who started working at the tire manufacturer Goodyear in 1979 before he became the only female supervisor and eventually realized that she was paid considerably less than her male colleagues, including much less experienced.

She complained and at one point she had received almost $ 4 million in compensation and Backpay. But in 2007, the American Supreme Court ruled that she had waited too long to sue, so she would ever collect her price.

In the end, with lobbying LEDBETTER and SUPPORTERS she picked up while she pursued her lawsuit, Congress asked legislation early in Barack Obama’s presidency that employees offered a larger latitude to complain about their employers about uneven and discriminatory reward.

Clarkson, born in New Orleans, said she hadn’t met Ledbetter before Her death At the age of 86 in October. So Clarkson said that she was largely inspired by her representation of her mother’s determined LEDbetter, Jacquelyn “Jackie” Brechtel Clarkson, who served several times as a democratic member of the New Orleans city council and the state legislator of Louisiana during a political career in their home town.

She was surprised about how her mother, who died At the age of 88 about four months before LEDbetter, it never endangered that he raised five daughters – “all working women” – while they were knocked down towards countless intense political fights.

“They had similar DNA in a way that came to me when I did these scenes,” said Clarkson.

To say the least, the political climate that is depicted in Lilly by Clarkson’s acting and by archive images of prominent liberal American figures who have tailored to her philosophically has changed seismically.

Between Trump presidents, the American Supreme Court eliminated the federal abortion rights established by Roe v Wade, a stunning blow to the reproductive rights of women.

Trump then spent his second presidency pushing his government to keep funds behind institutions that adhere to the practices that came nationally after the murder of George Floyd van Minneapolis on George Floyd in 2020.

Less than two weeks before Lilly’s theatrical release, the Minister of Defense of Trump, Pete Hegseeth, announced his intention to eliminate a program that is intended to promote the contributions and safety of women in global conflict zones. The announcement raised eyebrows, given that it was implemented during the first presidency of Trump and had drawn a ringing approval from his daughter, Ivanka.

Clarkson made it a point to deliver a passionate defense of dei measures in general and insisted on Americans to stay up to date with the subject, even though the other fighting is being raised by Trump’s second presidency.

“If we work with people of every race, credo, color, sexual preference – that’s the best part of this world we live in,” said Clarkson. “I refuse to live in the world,” demonize that concept.

Speaking with The Guardian After accepting the New Orleans Film Society’s Celluloid Hero Award and organizing a local display of Lilly in early April, Clarkson said she could not honestly imagine that the Trump administration was his sights on the equal wage output that has become synonymous with LEDbetter.

“The same wage is not – it’s not a political issue,” said Clarkson. “It’s a human rights issue.

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“Wherever you live in this great country, whether you are black or white or brown or young or old or whatever you are, republican or democrat – when women do wages, everyone wins.”

Yet the resident of New York City also fears that nothing is really off the table during a second Trump presidency that has already crushed the political standards that many could not imagine to be vulnerable. And if the administration dares to test something drastically as the re-implementation of a system where the wage is based on gender, she said she hoped that the public strong resistance of Ivanka herself is trying to talk to a woman’s sex attack in her father if necessary.

“How is it cool for someone to have his partner, the love of their lives, pay less, and you are still going to ask for sex?” said Clarkson, who once reached digital virality with an appearance in the video clip to the Lonely Island number Mother loverAn irreverent ballad of species for desired mothers. “I say,” Honey, there must be another bedroom where I sleep. “

Clarkson quickly pointed out that she is confident in the willingness of men to perform in the event that the performance of LEDBetter is once threatened immediately. By way of evidence, Clarkson said that she was happy that Lilly spent a decent amount of his 93 -minute runtime investigating how Ledbetter’s 52 -year -old husband, Charles, supported her professional goals and activism, despite the recoil they generated for the couple and their two children.

The decorated American veteran, played by John Benjamin Hickey, never tried to persuade her to settle for less than she believed that she deserved to alleviate part of the pressure in the hope. Instead, he stayed in her corner until his death at the age of 73 in 2008, just over a month before the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act fought for which his loved one fought so hard, the first piece of legislation was signed as president.

Clarkson said that Charles Ledbetter’s indisputable dedication to Lilly reminded her of the love that the mother of the actor shared with her father, Arthur Alexander “Buzz” Clarkson JR, a former medical school manager with whom Jackie had been married for more than 70 years.

“My father wanted my mother to run this city,” Clarkson said, sat in the living room of a suite on the 18th floor in the Windsor Court Hotel in the center of New Orleans. “My father wanted my mother to make this city better.

“Lilly’s husband wanted her to succeed. Charles … became entangled in her journey by realizing what she sacrificed and the injustice not to be paid”, sufficient for the time she has been in her family.

Clarkson has previously said that she chose to be unmarried and not having children. But she said she admired how her father and Charles Ledbetter were “Kick-Asspights who loved any time of them [wives’] Live ”. And it positioned the women who would like to thrive each of those men in the light of political adversity, and an example that Clarkson said she hopes that more American spouses – especially men – emulate.

As Clarkson put it: “These remarkable men stood with these women. And they wanted them.”