Random trivia question that I’m trying to find the answer to, to no avail:
What is the highest salary that was ever paid to an actor or actress who was acting in a movie for the very first time ever in their career?
Probably someone who was already famous when cast. Maybe Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl?
Michael Jordan in Space Jam?
Dwayne Johnson?
Ah yeah, those guess probably make sense, someone famous to begin with.
What about someone who wasn’t famous - what’s the highest they were ever paid first time?
Maybe an unknown cast for a blockbuster lead? Someone like Jake Lloyd, perhaps?
For unknowns making their film debut:
Not Jake Lloyd, since Phantom Menace wasn’t his first movie.
Christopher Reeve got a mere $250,000 for Superman, while Marlon Brando got over $3 million.
George Lazenby got a paltry $80,000 for his one Bond movie. Connery got $1 million to return two years later.
Those examples are over 40 years old, so there may be something higher by now. Although, as a data point, Daisy Ridley got somewhere between $100,000 and $300,000 for The Force Awakens (her second film), the same ballpark as Reeve almost 40 years earlier.
TMP wasn’t Lloyd’s first film, but you’re probably right about Emma Watson and Rupert Grint (Daniel Radcliffe had some prior film experience). I know that Watson made something like $70 million from the Harry Potter films as a whole.
I found a website that says Johnson was paid $5,500,000 for The Mummy Returns, which the website said was “among the highest salaries any untested actor has ever earned for a starring role.”
But does that count as his “first film role?” He’d previously appeared in The Mummy Returns, but only as a CGI monster. Before that, he’d been in a wrestling documentary. For most celebrities-turned-actors, I could see an exception for non-fiction roles where they appeared as themselves, but does that count for a professional wrestler? To what extent does appearing as “The Rock” in a wrestling documentary count as playing a fictional character?
In the Mummy Returns, he was mostly a voice, and the documentary was a documentary. I’d say it counts. Especially since the question is about appearing in a movie, so TV stars would be counted - someone who performed as a wrestler on TV and in a documentary should count.
Anyway… it depends how the question-setter has defined their boundaries. I bet it’ll be someone from the silent movie era, or a child star from the early days whose pay is now huge with inflation.
So maybe Charlie Chaplin or someone like that.
He’d previously appeared in — the same movie?
Chaplin was first hired by a film company on a $150 a week contract. His first film started production in “late January,” and was released February 2nd, 1915. So, at most he got two weeks pay for that film - $300. Which, according to a random inflation calculator I found online, works out to about 8,000 in 2021 dollars.
Ha! Wow. Weird reading comprehension failure on my part.
In my defense, I had just been looking at this cite, which attributes the $5.5 million paycheck to The Scorpion King.
Wow, that was a very different time… A movie released two weeks after production started?
It helps that it was only twelve and half minutes long.
Neil Armstrong. It costs skatey eight bazillion dollars for us to watch him hop around the moon mumbling platitudes.
Yeah but he wasn’t paid much.
So how much did Kubrick pay him?
[ducks] [runs] [more ducking]
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Not Jake Lloyd, since Phantom Menace wasn’t his first movie.
It is REALLY hard to believe he’d acted before.
Of course, that may say more about the director than the actor.
I’m speculating here, but he may have gotten one contract (and one paycheck) for agreeing to appear in both movies.