Daniel Radcliffe just spoke out about sexism in Hollywood

Back in 2014, our minds were blown when leaked Sony emails revealed how Jennifer Lawrence earned significantly less than her male co-stars in American Hustle. Since then a lot of celebs — Julianne Moore, Zoe Saldana, Emma Watson, Kristen Stewart, and Rose Byrne, to name a few — have spoken up about sexism in Hollywood. And now, in a recent interview with Australia’s Daily Telegraph, The Boy Who Lived — a.k.a. Daniel Radcliffe — is adding his two cents, calling the entire situation “nuts.”

Daniel admitted that he hadn’t previously known much about inequality in the movie industry and he admitted that as a white male, he hadn’t given it much thought before. “I’m incredibly glad [gender equality] has come up because I had just fucking naively thought this was not an issue any more because how can this still be happening? It’s crazy,” he told the Telegraph.

However, when the leaked Sony emails hit the press, Daniel was “shock[ed]” to see the issue from an entirely different perspective. “[T]he thing I can’t help but think is ‘Who? Who is doing that? What guy is sitting in a studio somewhere thinking, ‘let’s fuck the girls out of some money?’” he said. “. . . It is definitely the time for our industry to step up. Especially if we want to pride ourselves on being a liberal, progressive industry then you can’t be doing that.”

Daniel does, however, think that Hollywood is slowly changing for the better and now that his eyes have opened to the pervasive gender inequality in film, he’s seeing his world from a new perspective. (We’d like to think his friendship with Emma had something to do with this, too!) “The conversations that have been had over the past few years about the type of roles for women in films, the fact that these conversations have all taken place over the last few years and become much more open, should mean that you do start to see changes,” he explained. “And I feel like I am starting to see changes, particularly in the type of roles for women.

The topic then turned to last year’s Mad Max: Fury Road, a badass feminist film starring Charlize Theron as Imperator Furiosa that won six awards. “The themes of it are coming up more, you know, Furiosa,” Daniel explained. “. . . And you know what was really especially cool about [Mad Max] was that I feel like that was made long before a lot of this stuff was talked about. Its release was very timely, but it was made long before this was a hot topic. It’s very cool and I feel like there’s such a wealth of amazing actresses in the world right now and we’ve got to start writing better parts for them and paying them equally.”

All the props to Daniel for not only recognizing his own privilege, but for striving to learn more and speak out about such an important issue. Preach, Daniel, preach.