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PORTSIDE CULTURE

PATRICIA CLARKSON: ‘WHEN WOMEN MAKE EQUAL PAY, EVERYBODY WINS’  
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Patricia Clarkson
May 10, 2025
The Guardian
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_ The Oscar-nominated actor talks about her new role playing equal
pay advocate Lilly Ledbetter and why the Trump administration should
be careful _

Patricia Clarkson: ‘How is it cool for anyone to want their spouse,
the love of their life, to be paid less, and you’re still going to
ask for sex?’ , Photograph: Elisabeth Caren

 

Patricia Clarkson
[[link removed]], who portrays
late equal pay activist Lilly Ledbetter in a biopic released this
week, has a wish.

The Oscar-nominated actor hopes her fellow American women collectively
withhold sex from their partners – especially men in power – if
the second Trump administration’s assault on diversity, equity and
inclusion initiatives ever takes aim at the gains won by the subject
of her new film.

“Do not go after this – do not because there will be a Lysistrata
moment,” she told the Guardian in an interview recently, alluding to
the ancient Greek comedy
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women resolving to abstain from sex to compel the men in their nation
to stop warring and sign a peace treaty. “We will put chastity belts
back on.”

Clarkson is only the latest in a long lineage to float the idea of
a sex strike
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a protest tactic. Nonetheless, what sets the Easy A and Sharp Objects
star’s admonition and potential call to action apart is that it
comes as her leading role in Lilly coincides with the first months of
a second Donald Trump presidency marked in large part by the rollback
of policies meant to widen the professional opportunities of
historically underrepresented groups.

Directed by Rachel Feldman, Lilly
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endured by a working-class mother from Alabama who began working at
the tire manufacturer Goodyear in 1979 before becoming its only female
supervisor and eventually realizing she was paid substantially less
than her male colleagues, including much less experienced ones.

She sued and at one point had been awarded nearly $4m in damages and
backpay. But, in 2007, the US supreme court ruled that she had waited
too long to sue, preventing her from ever collecting her award.

Ultimately, with lobbying from Ledbetter and supporters that she
picked up while pursuing her lawsuit, Congress enacted legislation
early in Barack Obama’s presidency that afforded workers greater
latitude to sue their employers over unequal and discriminatory pay.

The New Orleans-born Clarkson said she did not get to meet Ledbetter
before her death
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age 86 in October. So Clarkson said she largely drew inspiration for
her portrayal of the resolute Ledbetter from her mother, Jacquelyn
“Jackie” Brechtel Clarkson, who served several terms as a
Democratic member of New Orleans’s city council and Louisiana’s
state legislature during a political career regarded as legendary in
their home town.

She marveled at how her mother, who died
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age 88 about four months before Ledbetter, never compromised raising
five daughters – “all working women” – while facing down
countless intense political battles.

“They had similar DNA in ways that came to me as I was doing these
scenes,” Clarkson said.

To say the least, the political climate depicted in Lilly through
Clarkson’s acting as well as through archival footage of prominent
liberal American political figures who philosophically aligned
themselves with her has changed seismically.

In between Trump presidencies, the US supreme court eliminated the
federal abortion rights established by Roe v Wade, a staggering blow
to women’s reproductive rights.

Trump has then spent his second presidency pushing his government to
withhold funds from institutions which adhere to DEI practices that
took hold nationally after the Minneapolis police’s murder of George
Floyd in 2020.

Less than two weeks before Lilly’s theatrical release, Trump’s
defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, announced his intent to eliminate a
program meant to promote women’s contributions and safety in global
conflict zones. The announcement raised eyebrows given that it was
implemented during Trump’s first presidency and had drawn a ringing
endorsement from his daughter, Ivanka.

Clarkson made it a point to deliver an impassioned defense of DEI
measures in general, urging Americans to stay informed about the topic
despite the other fights being stoked by Trump’s second presidency.

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

Speaking to the Guardian after accepting the New Orleans Film
Society’s Celluloid Hero Award and hosting a local screening of
Lilly in early April, Clarkson said she honestly could not envision
the Trump administration turning its crosshairs on the equal pay
progress that has become synonymous with Ledbetter.

“Equal pay is not – it’s not a political issue,” Clarkson
said. “It’s a human rights issue.

“Wherever you live across this great country, whether you are Black
or white or brown or young or old or whatever you are, Republican or
Democrat – when women make equal pay, everybody wins.”

Yet the New York City resident also fears nothing is truly off the
table during a second Trump presidency that has already shattered
political norms many could not imagine being vulnerable. And if the
administration dares to test something as drastic as re-implementing a
system where pay is based on gender, she said she hoped the public
mounts commensurate resistance – from Ivanka herself trying to talk
some sense into her father to a women’s sex strike if necessary.

[Patricia Clarkson in Lilly]

Patricia Clarkson in Lilly. Photograph: Blue Harbor Entertainment

“How is it cool for anyone to want their spouse, the love of their
life, to be paid less, and you’re still going to ask for sex?”
said Clarkson, who once attained digital virality with an appearance
in the music video to the Lonely Island song Mother Lover
[[link removed]],
an irreverent ballad of sorts to desirable moms. “I say, ‘Honey,
there must be another bedroom I’m sleeping in.’”

Clarkson was quick to point out that she has faith in the willingness
of men to step up in the event that Ledbetter’s achievements are
ever directly threatened. By way of evidence, Clarkson said she was
glad Lilly spent a decent amount of its 93-minute run time exploring
how Ledbetter’s husband of 52 years, Charles, steadily supported her
professional goals and activism despite the backlash they generated
for the couple and their two children.

The decorated US army veteran, played by John Benjamin Hickey, never
sought to persuade her to settle for less than she believed that she
deserved in hopes of easing some of the pressure. He instead remained
in her corner until his death at 73 in 2008, a little more than a
month before the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act for which his beloved
battled so hard became the first piece of legislation Obama signed as
president.

Clarkson said Charles Ledbetter’s unquestioning devotion to Lilly
reminded her of the love the actor’s mother shared with her father,
Arthur Alexander “Buzz” Clarkson Jr, a former medical school
administrator to whom Jackie was married for more than 70 years.

“My father wanted my mother to run this city,” Clarkson said while
seated in the living room of an 18th-floor suite in downtown New
Orleans’s Windsor Court hotel. “My father wanted my mother to make
this city better.

“Lilly’s husband wanted her to succeed. Charles … got caught up
in her journey in realizing what she was sacrificing and the injustice
of not being paid” adequately for the time she dedicated to making
ends meet for her family.

Clarkson has previously said that she chose to be unmarried and not
have children. But she said she admired how her father and Charles
Ledbetter were “kick-ass husbands who loved every single moment of
their lives”. And it positioned the women whom each of those men
loved to thrive in the face of political adversity, providing an
example Clarkson said she hopes more American spouses – especially
husbands – emulate.

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

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Lilly is out in US cinemas now with a UK date to be announced

* Lilly Ledbetter
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* Lilly
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* Patricia Clarkson
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* equal pay
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* sex strike
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* Donald Trump
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