'Criminal Minds' star Kirsten Vangsness gets candid about her and AJ Cook's fight for equal pay on the hit show
Back in 2013, when CBS' 'Criminal Minds' was almost wrapping up its eighth season, Deadline reported that two actors from the long-running and very successful show may not come back for Season 9. Why? They were not happy with being paid consistently less than half their male counterparts.
Kirsten Vangsness and AJ Cook, who are friends off-screen and badass colleagues on screen, had reportedly turned down offers from the bosses, and with the clock ticking, it was unclear whether they would make it back. 'Criminal Minds' had already been through rocky roads after allegedly trimming its female cast for financial reasons. Cook was allegedly not picked up at the time and co-star Paget Brewster's screen time was significantly cut down.
Eventually, an agreement was reached between Vangsness, Cook and ABC Studios, CBS TV Studios and CBS but the issue came up again in 2017. This time, they were ready to walk, reports said.
Vangsness, who is an original cast member of the crime drama right from the start, plays the character of quirky and smart hacker Penelope Garcia. She recently opened up about what really went on when she had no choice but to take a stand.
In an interview with MEA WorldWide (MEAWW), Vangsness said it was triggered because the female castmates of the show had been "really transparent" with one another.
"All of us are really transparent, but the girls are really, really close. We just got to a point where we sat in a hot tub together, all four of us, and we're like, how much did you get paid? And they're not betting on you doing that," she recalls.
She also adds that the male costars were all rooting for them and she had no intention of giving into the status quo. "If things have always been a certain way, people are just like, 'Oh, that's the way it is'. Right? And you just kind of go along until you're like 'wait a minute'. So it really wasn't like there were no bad guys in it. It was just when the contract negotiation came up, I asked what I thought was reasonable," she says.
Cook's character JJ was appearing in extremely mild doses and so was Brewster's. "Garcia had been there the whole time. So 'the rationale that they were using' didn't make sense to me," she says, adding, "You don't want to get paid more than someone who has more expertise than you and who's been around the block more. But then, it's a weird thing when you're talking about value," she said, "there is no real metric."
"The thing that got curious is there wasn't a single woman on that show that had more expertise than me that was making more than me," she recalled, and that's when all the bells went off.
"What seemed across the board was, well, why are all the people with the uterus getting paid the least? So I just went to them and said, this seems strange," Vangsness recalls. If they couldn't explain it to her, they didn't see women as valuable, she felt.
"If that is true, that's good information to know. I should then lead this job and go try to find another job. Because if I am not valuable, I need to go increase my value because I would really like to do this job for the rest of my life," she had thought.
Vangsness did come back along with Cook, who is still an integral part of the show. The final season of the show, Season 15, is airing on January 8 on CBS.