How Wall Street thriller Equity flips the script on gender norms

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Forget about the Bechdel Test – the new film Equity just might have inadvertently invented the Gordon Gekko Test, as in: Does the movie feature at least two women talking to each other about something other than money? The answer here: not really. But the high-finance drama shouldn't be faulted for being obsessed with cash – it's simply tackling the industry in much the same way Oliver Stone's Wall Street, J.C. Chandor's Margin Call and Martin Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street excoriated the dude-bros who run and ruin the world. Except this time, it's women calling the shots, and taking them.

That's the unfortunately novel marketing hook selling Equity: its three lead characters are women; it was directed by a woman; it was written by women; and it was largely funded by women (about 80 per cent of its 30 investors). Audiences would be hard-pressed to find any recent comparisons, in any genre – and the fact that the film focuses on the testosterone-heavy world of stocks and IPOs simply makes the production that much more extraordinary. (If you can name one woman in, say, The Big Short who's not a bubble-bath-soaked Margot Robbie or a nameless stripper, then congratulations, you've tried extraordinarily hard, or at least harder than The Big Short's filmmakers.)

"What's the one thing that makes you want to get up in the morning?" the film's ostensible hero, investment banker Naomi, is asked at the beginning of Equity. Her response: "I like money." From that point on, it's clear that director Meera Menon has no desire to play nice, or capitulate to gender stereotypes, or to give a damn about anything other than exploring the brutal and hungry capitalists who roam lower Manhattan. Which is exactly what attracted Anna Gunn to the starring role, her first feature lead since dominating the small screen on AMC's critical juggernaut Breaking Bad.

"Certainly knowing that it was fully funded and created and produced and directed and all of that by women was an amazing thing," says Gunn, "but at the end of the day, for me, the story is the most important thing – and the way that Amy Fox wrote the screenplay … it was so smart and nuanced that I felt connected to it immediately."

That same level of nuance is what attracted Carrie Blair, a Wall Street veteran now based in Toronto, to invest in the film. Through a New York friend, Blair connected with Equity's executive producer Candy Straight, and "was offered a chance to read the script – when am I ever going to get the opportunity to read a movie script?" says Blair, executive vice-president, chief human resources and communications officer, for Sun Life Financial. "I read it over the weekend, and – I've worked on Wall Street, I've worked in wealth management – I knew there was something there. What better thing to do than help these women get it off the ground?"

It's a depressing fact that without private investors such as Blair, Equity would have never seen the light of day. After all, its leads are determined, layered women who have no patience for the niceties expected of them in typical Hollywood productions. Take Gunn's role, the hot-shot Naomi, who finds herself surrounded by enemies and enemies of enemies as she seeks to salvage a social media startup's fishy IPO. It's a rich and sharp role that doesn't shy away from the myriad challenges women face in the high-pressure financial industry – or any industry, the entertainment world included.

"With Naomi, we talked a lot about the idea of her boxing, and getting her aggression out. For all intents and purposes, she's a boxer in that world, a fighter and a warrior – she has to be. And that connected with me instantly," says the 48-year-old Gunn. "I didn't really get my big break, which I consider Deadwood, until my mid-30s. So I was acting for 15 years, and I was proud and happy to be a working actor. But I did wonder if it would ever get past episodic roles. So I felt a connection to [Naomi] that made me want to both play her and explore that fierce determination, where you set your goals and then you come to a crossroads, and ask yourself: Is this what I want?"

It's a question that Gunn has had to ask herself many times, even after scoring that aforementioned break on HBO's acclaimed western. Although she went on to win two Emmys for her work on the drug drama Breaking Bad, her character on that AMC series – Skyler White, the suspicious wife of suburban drug kingpin Walter – engendered a bizarrely intense hostility among certain fans, some of whom mounted an online campaign to toss Gunn from the show. The vitriol led her to pen an op-ed letter for The New York Times, in which she refused to be pigeonholed by trolls: "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."

Given the overall toxic atmosphere of the current online landscape – where just the notion of female Ghostbusters is cause for frothing-at-the-mouth outrage in certain corners – it is not hard to predict a similar movement forming against Equity.

Gunn herself might not dwell long on that possibility, though she is quick to admit that the entertainment industry is steeped in an atmosphere of aggressive machismo. "I was blessed with Breaking Bad to have extraordinarily strong female producers in Michelle MacLaren and Melissa Bernstein, who taught me so much about being in those leadership positions and what they had to deal with in a predominantly male-driven profession. I mean, a film set is a very macho environment," she says. "You have got to have a thick skin, a good sense of humour, and be ready to stand up and go toe to toe."

And while Equity trades on all those same high-tension work-place trappings – Naomi is constantly having to prove herself to her dismissive male superior, and every one of her co-workers would be fine with stabbing one another in the back if it meant a promotion – Gunn notes that the real Wall Street is not necessarily as cutthroat as the film makes it out to be.

"In my research – talking to women in the industry and kicking around Goldman Sachs, there really was a strong sense of sisterhood and support and compassion and empathy and understanding," says Gunn. "Everyone underlined how important it was to have one woman at your firm who you knew had your back and vice versa."

In the meantime, Gunn and Equity's producers will no doubt be watching the box-office returns carefully – both to satisfy atypically invested investors such as Blair, and to see if the film might represent a sea change of sorts.

"All I'm hoping for, as we continue to move along this conversation about new roles for women, is that we focus on intellect, talents, the soul of a human being, more than the external trappings of what it means to be a more traditional woman," says Gunn. "And it's nice to see women pushing those boundaries."

Equity is now playing in Toronto and Montreal, and opens Aug. 19 in Vancouver, Sept. 2 in Ottawa and other Canadian cities throughout the fall.