The day after the ceremony, the kindling finally caught flame. Jessica Chastain, who has 750,000 Twitter followers, is one of the most vocal advocates for equity in Hollywood, and also happens to be an old friend of Williams’s (they co-starred in a 2004 stage production of The Cherry Orchard), texted her to ask permission to tweet about the issue. Williams responded, “Yeah, sure, go for it. But it’s already out there, and nobody cared.”

Regardless, Chastain went ahead. “I heard for the re-shoot she got $80 a day compared to his MILLIONS,” she tweeted. “Would anyone like to clarify? I really hope that with everything coming to light, she was paid fairly. She’s a brilliant actress and is wonderful in the film.” Williams’s crisp, lockjawed portrayal of Gail Harris—the mother of John Paul Getty III, and the flinty moral backbone of a dissipated and depraved family—is the beating heart of the movie; that her performance garnered a Golden Globe nomination only renders her paltry fee all the more galling. (Ridley Scott, who in mid-December told USA Today that all the actors did the re-shoots “for nothing,” could not be reached for comment.) “Please go see Michelle’s performance in All the Money in the World,” Chastain tweeted the following day, after USA Today reported the exact figures. “She’s a brilliant Oscar nominated Golden Globe winning actress. She has been in the industry for 20 yrs. She deserves more than 1% of her male co-star’s salary.” The time was right. The world had shifted, and the news spread, says Williams, “like wildfire.”

Her phone started blowing up. What was she going to do? Would she leave her agency? Make a public statement? She was acutely aware that the moment was symbolic. “I’ve never really been at the center of something like that, of a news cycle like that—other than, you know, traumatic death,” she says. During the ensuing week, “between Jess re-breaking the bone of the story and WME offering a monetary apology,” as Williams puts it, she had a series of telephone conversations with the (male) higher-ups at the agency. She called her new friend, activist Mónica Ramírez, co-founder of the National Farmworker Women’s Alliance and head of the National Latina Equal Pay Day Campaign, whom she had gotten to know during the planning for the Golden Globes, to help coach her. They spoke on the phone, Williams says, “on breaks from work, after our kids went to bed, and before they woke up in the morning.”

After each call with WME, Williams would notice that her hands were shaking. “But I would think about what Mónica had told me. That if it was hard to negotiate on my own behalf, I should imagine myself negotiating for her. Or for my daughter.”

OWNING IT

Jeans by Wrangler; hat by JJ Hat Center; belt by Lucchese; bolo by Lisa Eisner; vintage shirt and belt buckle from Early Halloween. Photograph by Collier Schorr. THE SURVIVOR

Swimsuit by Speedo USA. Photograph by Collier Schorr.

Wahlberg made the donation on his own, Williams says; she never spoke to him about it. (When I ask Wahlberg for comment, one of his managers, Sarah Lum, e-mails: “I don’t think any of us want to talk about that ever again. ;) ”)

In the end, Williams chose not to leave either her agent or WME—a decision that seems, well, surprising. Later, when I press her on it, she will say that her agent, Brent Morley, is someone she “values creatively,” adding, “I believe in second chances.”

For her, what resonates from the experience is the power generated by women banding together. “I was one woman by myself,” she says, “and I couldn’t do anything about it. But in the wolf pack—the phrase Abby Wambach uses—things are possible. And that’s really what it took: somebody who was at the head of the pack, Jessica Chastain, pulling me up with her, and then all these other women surrounding me, teaching me.” Says Chastain, “No one should have to step out onto a limb on their own. We are all here to share the weight. It’s easy to label one actress difficult, harder to label a group.”