Orlando Bloom once said he got paid “nothing” for The Lord of the Rings movies. “$175,000, that’s what I got.” That’s over $300,000 adjusted for inflation. This is madness.
Movies stars aren’t like us. They live in palatial mansions in the Los Angeles hills, they travel the world for business and pleasure, and they regularly get paid sums of money that would change the lives of most ordinary people. We all love our favorite actors. And there’s nothing wrong with being successful and rich, but money leads to a change in perspective, and sometimes it can be jarring to realize how big that change is.
For instance, recently Cate Blanchett has been in the news for an appearance on Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen where the host asked her to name the biggest paycheck she ever got for a film. She demurred, which is fine, but was quick to assure Cohen that her biggest paycheck wasn’t from The Lord of the Rings, where she played elven queen Galadriel. “No one got paid anything to do that movie,” she said, qualifying that she didn’t get a part of the backend because “that was way before any of that…No, nothing.” She wanted to work on The Lord of the Rings because she a fan of director Peter Jackson’s horror film Braindead. “I mean, I basically got free sandwiches. And I got to keep my ears.”
I’m sure that compared to what she’s used to, Blanchett’s payday for The Lord of the Rings was small, but given that she had already been nominated for an Oscar beforehand for Elizabeth, I can guarantee that it was a damn sight more than “nothing.”
Blanchett isn’t the only Lord of the Rings cast member to talk like this. Back in 2019, Orlando Bloom (Legolas) went on The Howard Stern Show and got specific about how much he’d been paid. “Nothing, nothing I got nothing. $175,000 that’s what I got,” he said.
As it happens, we can put that amount of money into context. If we measure it from 2003, the year the final Lord of the Rings movie came out, we find that $175,000 back then is worth around $300,000 today. The Lord of the Rings movies filmed for 438 days, mostly in 2000 and a bit towards the end of 1999, with pickup shots done off and on for a couple years afterwards. Legolas is a supporting character, so he definitely wasn’t working for that whole time, but Bloom also would have had to do prep beforehand, so for the purposes of this exercise we’ll say he was working for all of those 438 days.
So that means he made $300,000 for around one year and four months of work. That’s well beyond the average yearly salary of someone in the U.S. today, which is around $63,795, to say nothing of how much higher it would have been for an ordinary person in the early 2000s. Worldwide, average yearly income today is closer to $18,000.
I know these actors aren’t thinking about all this when they off-handedly make jokes about how little they made on this or that movie, and Bloom qualified that he would happily do it all again for less. “Listen, greatest gift of my life, are you kidding me. And you’d do it again for half the money,” he said. But these moments are still uncomfortable because they lay bare, intentionally or not, the enormous gulf that separates the wealthy from the masses. And it seem like the wealthier you are, the easier it is to forget that this gulf exists.
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