When the actress Robin Wright was negotiating a pay raise that would make her earnings for “House of Cards” equal to those of her co-star Kevin Spacey, she used a tactic that would’ve made her alter ego, Claire Underwood, proud: She leveraged her power by threatening to go public about pay inequality.

Ms. Wright, who plays a calculating first lady to Mr. Spacey’s equally ruthless President Frank Underwood on the Netflix drama, told the audience at a Rockefeller Foundation event in New York on Tuesday that she’d learned the two characters were equally popular with viewers.

“So I capitalized on it,” Ms. Wright told the room, according to The Huffington Post. “I was like, ‘You better pay me or I’m going to go public.’ ”