Sophie Turner and Kit Harington have been costars for, it's safe to say, a while now: Game of Thrones' eighth and final season is premiering on April 14, and although we have so many questions about what's to come on the hit show, there's a zero percent chance we're going to be getting any satisfactory answers until each episode unfolds. (However, you can bet that this hasn't stopped fans from coming up with plenty of theories about what's going to happen.) There's one thing that can be cleared up, though, and that's the matter of why Turner, who plays Sansa Stark, and Harington, who plays Jon Snow, aren't getting paid the same for the work they do on the show.
In an industry where there are headline-making gender pay gaps—remember when Michelle Williams reportedly got paid less than $1,000 while Mark Wahlberg got $1.5 million for a movie reshoot?—discrepancies like this are beginning to receive extra scrutiny. Turner was recently asked by Harper's Bazaar UK about her views on the difference between her and Harington's paychecks for the show. Asking for equal pay on set, she told the magazine, is "a little tricky. Kit got more money than me, but he had a bigger storyline. And for the last series, he had something crazy like 70 night shoots, and I didn’t have that many. I was like, 'You know what…you keep that money.'"
As The Hollywood Reporter wrote in 2014 about negotiations for the show's seventh season, the cast—among the highest-paid on cable TV—is divided into tiers to determine compensation: Tier A includes the main roles, played by actors including Harington, Lena Headey (Cersei Lannister), and Emilia Clarke (Daenerys Targaryen). Tier B includes Turner and Maisie Williams (Arya Stark); and there's another tier beyond that's filled by actors with smaller roles.
But Turner's still been able to wield her influence to advance equality behind the scenes: As she told Harper's Bazaar UK, she has an inclusion rider in her contract, which stipulates that the male/female ratio of a project's workforce must be an even 50-50. And when there's so much work to be done in the industry, every step forward counts.
