You paddle like hell to catch a wave. And once one the wave you have to work like hell not to left behind by it, because there’s no catching up. Unlike surfing, each person only gets a couple of opportunities per lifetime to catch any wave.
In showbiz, the vast, vast majority of surfers never catch any wave of significance. The ones who do need to do whatever it takes to stay on the wave. And that amounts to getting their name and face in front of the public and keeping it there. Early and often.
A commercial is an easy way to keep the fame / top-of-mind momentum going between major movies, shows, albums, whatever. The fact it makes some coin is really secondary to the fact it keeps the rest of the fame train rolling towards your next big payoff.
It’s also a form of retirement planning. Folks who age out of whatever they’re famous for who’ve established themselves as a face for commercials will have work later. c.f. sports celebrity spokespeople.
Folks who’re arguing “You’ve got enough money, why bother getting more?” simply don’t understand what motivates high achievers. If nothing else the ego stroke of cashing a $10M paycheck is a real adrenaline hit. Or so I’m told; haven’t had the privilege myself.
I think you underestimate the human capacity to spend money.
You or I might think “A million dollars? I’m set for life!” But a person living a luxurious lifestyle would think “A million dollars? I’m set for January.”
This was traditionally the case (and was, of course, what the movie Lost in Translation was about). The stigma about appearing in TV ads in the U.S. seems to have decreased substantially: top actors like George Clooney, Julia Roberts, Charlize Theron, Johnny Depp, Natalie Portman, Keira Knightley, Jennifer Aniston, and Idris Elba all now regularly appear in television ads here.
I agree with other posters: I don’t think it’s simply about money, but about keeping their faces visible with the public and building their personal brands.
Or a couple hours in an audio booth doing a commercial voice over. No makeup, no wardrobe, no lights. And they may not even identify you in the ad. But if you’re a big star, even your un-identified voice can be worth big bucks.
My salary is 3.2% of my net worth. I assure you I would be concerned if it didn’t go up to 3.5% in our upcoming salary increases.
If you had asked 22 year old me (with a net worth of $5000, most of which was a car) if 33 years later I should care about a raise of a few thousand when I had a net worth of several million, I would have told you I’d have to be crazy.
Yet here we are. Some of it is that you can’t have too much money, and the other is that it’s a way of keeping score of your value to society.
This. For most of us, losing a job doesn’t happen that often. Actors lose every job they ever had, maybe in days or weeks or rarely years. Actors do more interviews (auditions) in a year than we do in a lifetime. Maybe famous ones now don’t have to worry about this, but they did when they were coming up.
Plus, you never know if your next movie or show will be a bomb and you’ll turn into box office poison. Doing commercials for them is probably fun, breaks up the in-between gig boredom, and does pay. Why not?
Because they can. It’s easy money and boosts their visibility. Both good things for actors waiting for their next big role. Plus, some actors stop getting work at some point so “making hay while the sun shines” is a smart financial strategy during the dry periods, Also, there are lots of famous people, including actors, that feel making a commercial is below them and won’t do them. It’s not like all successful people make commercials…
The same principle applies to working on bad films.
In 1987, Michael Caine accepted $1.5 million to put in a week’s work in the Caribbean (bringing his family along for the vacation) on Jaws: The Revenge, the fourth in the series. He later wrote in an autobiography, “I have never seen the film, but by all accounts it was terrible. However, I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific.”
A diversified portfolio of income has saved a lot of celebrities from destitution. No doubt, there are former pop stars who can’t sell out a 200 seat club in their dotage but can still rely on checks from a jingle adapted from one of their songs decades ago.
One million Sterling for what was probably a couple of days of no-prep work? That isn’t a fiscal equation your agent is going to advise you to turn down (although how Hugo Boss is still a thing in this day outside of the far right crowd is beyond me).
Also, understand that people with “extreme wealth” aren’t keeping that money in a bank account or in big piles of specie in a hidden fault like Scrooge McDuck; their money is “invested” in various endeavors, many of them specifically designed to shelter them from paying taxes. In many cases, the very wealthy can’t even directly access the majority of their wealth because they’ve transferred it to a “charitable foundation” or in “offshore” accounts (many of them actually in the United States), or they’ve invested in real estate that is often a fake business or an empty Manhattan high rise condo. While they can get loans from these foundations or transfer money around between shell companies to get the money they need to purchase or lease expensive luxuries, the cheap and easy income of doing commercials, voice-over work, and other low effort employment is basically the ultrawealthy equivalent of walking-around-town money that the can spend freely without working about explaining its provenance.
In the case of many older actors and other famous people in entertainment, the money is what funds their retirement or interests because the odds of becoming a wealthy entertainer are almost infinitesimal even if they have talent, and most people who do not start with a leg up by having a parent in the industry don’t make a real living at it until they are in middle life if that. DeNiro famously started doing American Express commercials to fund the Tribeca Festival and his numerous investments in the area; Tommy Lee Jones poured his “Boss Coffee” ads (which are actually really entertaining) into his 3000 acre Texas ranch; and as someone mentioned Lost In Translation, one of the inspirations for the film was that the director’s father, Francis Coppola and famed Japanese director Akira Kurosawa (whom Coppola helped support and get distribution in the US) actually did a series of commercials for Suntory Whiskey. Of course, a lot of musicians over the years have remained solvent only by dint of selling the rights to songs for some commercial purpose, and almost nobody critiques them for doing so.
At least actors are doing an ‘honest days work’ for their easy commercial money, which is more than you can say about hedge fund managers who leverage their clients’ wealth or cryptobros selling less informed people on their pyramid investment schemes.
More or less. They’re generally taking reported payment for a few films, extrapolating it, and then stating as if it is a hard figure rather than accounting for all of the money that goes to agents, talent managers, investment managers, PR flacks, coke dealers, et cetera. Many mid-level ‘celebrities’ are actually far less cash rich than the people who ostensibly work for them. Eddie Murphy didn’t make Meet Dave because he read the script and thought to himself, “This is the film that is going to revitalize my career!”
I think the OP answered the question themselves. When you’re an established celebrity with a huge net worth, you only need minimal work (re: commercials) to make another million, an option not many people ever have. Wouldn’t you?
Any celebrity with any sense of how things work knows their fortunes may turn any time. A household name today, a has-been tomorrow. Living large costs a lot of money. 150 mil can vanish in a decade or two, easy. Wanting to maintain the lifestyle for your foreseeable future means you better take the money you can while you can get it. When it “costs” almost nothing to make it (unlike a potential flop of a movie etc.), it’s a no-brainer to take the money.
People keep forgetting that what actors get paid is reported as gross salary. Say Hemsworth gets $10 million for a movie. He loses 44% right off the top for Federal and State taxes. Then he loses +/- 20% of the gross that goes to his agent, publicist, flak people, etc. If he’s lucky, he’ll bank a couple of million. Maybe. As Stranger noted above, midlevel actors can really get caught in a cash bind that isn’t obvious to the common person. Being rich can cost a lot of money.
Yeah, Hugh Laurie did a 2013 L’Oreal ad and gave the money to Comic Relief, for example. Cumberbatch is also well-known for his charitable endeavors, and AFAICT his recent appearance in an NHS blood donation ad campaign was volunteer work, not paid.
Both for charitable-giving purposes and for personal wealth accumulation, as others have explained, if you can get large amounts of money for doing a small amount of work, why wouldn’t you? Where’s the downside?