Like millions of Americans, on Monday Anna Gunn watched Michelle Obama’s endorsement of Hillary Clinton at the Democratic convention in complete awe. “I made it up to my room just in time to see it and I thought, ‘Yes!’” the actor says, her eyes shining.
It’s the day after the first lady made her stirring plea to voters, and a happy, relaxed Gunn is seated in a posh hotel suite in New York. “I was applauding and shouting back at the TV. It was just so exciting.”
Gunn has reason to be doubly revved-up. Equity, her first film since completing five seasons on Breaking Bad, opens on Friday, months after premiering to enthusiastic reviews at the Sundance film festival. Given Clinton’s recent historic clinching of the Democratic nomination, the timing for Gunn – an avid Clinton supporter – couldn’t be sweeter.
Equity, you see, is an anomaly in Hollywood: not only does it boast an all-female core creative team, including producer co-stars Sarah Megan Thomas and Alysia Reiner, screenwriter Amy Fox and director Meera Menon; it’s also the first financial thriller in which women call the shots.
“I really did like The Wolf of Wall Street,” Gunn says, looking almost guilty. “But not seeing women represented in that world, it definitely had less resonance for me.”
In Equity, Gunn plays Naomi Bishop, an ambitious senior investment banker. At the outset of Menon’s sleek and arresting film, Bishop is reeling from a recent deal gone sour because her client had a last-minute change of heart. Bishop asks why, and is told: “You rub people the wrong way.” As a result, her snide male boss overlooks her for a deserved promotion, forcing her to latch on to the public offering of a new viral media privacy app that could help her score big, and put her back on top.
“For women, no matter what career, what path you choose, it’s still an uphill battle to work your way up to these top leadership positions,” Gunn says. “And you’re much more closely scrutinized for everything – for things that men are not. Now, because of this time [we’re in], it’s a much broader conversation really. We really wanted to not only talk about women in Wall Street but women in all positions of life.”
The world of trading was somewhat familiar to Gunn before making the film, because her father once worked as a stockbroker. To beef up on her finance knowledge, Gunn spent time shadowing a number of Wall Street’s top female bosses, some of whom are executive producers on Equity.
Gunn, however, didn’t need much assistance to get inside the mind of a powerful woman battling institutional sexism in her profession. Being a successful female actor in Hollywood, Gunn knows all too well what it’s like to be routinely put under the microscope.
After winning her first Emmy in 2013 for playing Skyler White (she won a second for the show’s final season), the long-suffering wife to Bryan Cranston’s drug kingpin husband Walter White, Gunn was barely given a moment to revel in her achievement, before having to talk about her weight in public after publications such as the Daily Mail, described her appearance as “worryingly thin”. Talking to People magazine, Gunn explained that while filming the show, she was on medication that caused her to gain weight, and that she’s simply back to her old, fitter self. “I run around after two kids – and I do pilates,” she said at the time.
“I reached a career high, and all the questions were not about what I put into the world, but more about how I looked,” Gunn recalls. “That was disturbing. I didn’t even want to really comment on it, because why should you? Why should I have to explain myself? But I got tired of being asked about it.”
At the same time, Gunn also endured attacks from fans of Breaking Bad, incensed by the reluctance of her character to accept her husband’s double-life cheerfully. The online vitriol got so intense that Gunn felt compelled to pen an opinion column that ran in the New York Times, in which she directly addressed the troubling nature of Skyler’s unpopularity.
“My character, to judge from the popularity of websites and Facebook pages devoted to hating her, has become a flash point for many people’s feelings about strong, non-submissive, ill-treated women,” she wrote. “Because Skyler didn’t conform to a comfortable ideal of the archetypical female, she had become a kind of Rorschach test for society, a measure of our attitudes toward gender.”
Looking back on that troubling episode, Gunn shares that the “personal attacks” are what hurt the most.
“It went from disliking the character, then hating the character, to then hating me. It became about not liking the way I look: I’m either too thin; I’ve gained too much weight; I’m too tall; they don’t like my face; they don’t like my voice. To be picked apart in that way is brutal.
“Skyler was demonized as a character – and I was demonized as the actor playing her,” she continues. “It’s the same thing I think women in any profession who are rising to the top endure: they get scrutinized more closely and more harshly than men do.”
Gunn says she sympathizes with Ghostbusters star Leslie Jones, who recently endured even harsher racist and misogynist abuse on Twitter.
“It made me angry,” Gunn says of the slurs hurled at Jones. “It makes me sad. Whoever has the time to be sitting down and writing all that stuff, I don’t know what kind of life that is, but it doesn’t seem like a great life to me.”
Jones didn’t cave in to her attackers by leaving Twitter; nor did Gunn retreat from the spotlight, even after receiving what she describes as a death threat from a female Twitter user, who wrote: “I want to find out where Anna Gunn lives, so I can kill her.”
Gunn likens the gender-targeted venom to the some of the attacks made on Clinton by her opposers. “I just have to silence the TV sometimes because it’s just overwhelming,” she says, sighing heavily.
For that reason, she says she found the experience of making Equity, a female-empowering project, “extraordinarily liberating”.
“It’s important for women to continue to break through barriers in our industry, in politics, in Wall Street,” she says. “And now that I have two daughters, that’s even more important.
“My mom told me I could do anything I want, be anyone I want. I believed it. And so I want my daughters to as well.”
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