Emmy Rossum didn’t want her fight for equal pay on the Shameless set to go public — but it ended up working in her favor.
“I was on a writer’s retreat, and I was procrastinating, and I opened up Twitter,” Rossum, 39, recalled during the Wednesday, July 8, episode of the “Call Her Daddy” podcast. “It was a headline that we were in a stalemate, and I was shook.”
She added, “It’s a private business negotiation, and I never imagined it would become public.”
Rossum explained that when she was cast on the show, her costar William H. Macy was first on the call sheet and “made a lot more money” than she did. The actress told podcast host Alex Cooper that the discrepancy “made a lot of sense” to her at the time.
By season 3, however, Rossum thought “it made sense” for her to ask for equal pay, but she was unsuccessful. As the show continued to succeed and the network added more seasons, Rossum had started to direct. She requested equal pay again in 2016 — ahead of the show’s eighth season.
“It was shut down pretty fast, and we lingered for a while. I wasn’t sure if we were going to get it,” Rossum recalled on Wednesday. “It’s always scary asking for what you think you’re worth.”
After news of her contract negotiations went public, Rossum said “the tide really shifted,” with fans of the show expressing confusion as to why she wasn’t making more money.
“People seemed to write other articles, immediately commenting on that. Being quite surprised that I wasn’t already being paid equal,” she recalled. “It was resolved within a day. I was shocked — shocked — and quite frankly, very, very surprised that we actually got it.”
Rossum played Fiona Gallagher on Shameless, which ran on Showtime for 11 seasons from 2011 to 2021. Rossum left after season 9.
“I only desire to remain professional, and my focus is never on money, it’s on what’s fair and what’s right, and I believe that people should be paid for their labor,” Rossum explained on Wednesday. “It was really about being valued equally when I was doing equal work. For me, it was as simple as that. I was very, very happy when we got it and very, very happy for what it seemingly did for other women.”
She added, “I think ambition and wanting to be in the driver’s seat of your life is not something to be shied away from. I think [being] likable should not be the focus. It focuses on outward in, not what we know to be true about ourselves and our worth.”
