This is yet another way celebrities can’t win: you ask why he’s so greedy, but someone else grumbles on Reddit about how Cumberbatch thinks he’s too good to do a Nissan commercial, the arrogant bastard, turning down a million pounds like it’s nothing.
I think a large part of it is that many performers have experienced insanely lean periods, and no matter how much they’ve got now, they can’t forget when a million for a few days work was the dream.
Your George Clooney screencap reminded me that he once voiced Sparky, the Gay Dog (no words, just barks) in a South Park episode. IIRC he begged them to be on the show, they offered that part and no other, and he took it. He might or might not have gotten a big paycheck for that, but clearly his motivation was other than money.
Also, there’s the other half of this transaction:
The Brand that’s doing the adverising.
Their marketing department wants their product to be endorsed by the big box office celebrity. They will shop around for such a spokesperson and offer a paycheck in the league with the market value of his/her/their time’s worth.
Sure, the company could make a dozen ads with regular workman actors for what that cost them, or they could get a hundred “influencers” on social media to sing their praises in exchange for a couple of free samples each, but that’s not what they decided they need.
And if a company comes up to you and says “please take my money”, why not? As mentioned, the old stigma of it being “beneath them” has been long dead and buried, by now it’s just a matter of whether they want another day off more than another half million.
Which is unfortunate, of course. I have no idea what a unique person like Warren Buffett or Jeff Bezos is worth to society, who can say. But one thing I’m certain of from working in Wall Street is that there are a very large number of people at an intermediate level in that industry who vastly overestimate their value to society.
Of course, what often matters most is that it measures your value relative to your immediate peers.
That’s exactly the context for most people. Telling me I’m making more than the holder of an equivalent position in the Philippines is not going to mean much to me. I’m more concerned what the equivalent position in a company across the street is paying.
I give Judi Dench a pass. She’s 88, nearly blind, can no longer read nor write due to macula degeneration. If she wants to grab any work that makes her feel involved, let her.
I would guess that the stars’ agents/managers really encourage the commercials to them so they can get their own cut, figuring there’s little down side to the performer.
If you’ve ever seen any of Tommy Lee Jones ($100m) Suntory coffee commercials you’d think he was doing it for fun. Classroom
wasn’t there an e! series on famous people where they had a thing on brad and Angie that revealed they personally employed 30-60 people a year? And only personally received like 30 of every 100 k they made after expensive?
Yeah. It’s bad karma not to take care of all the little people “that got me here”. Many celebrities have a lot of mouths to feed. I believe there are well off Rock bands that have gone on tour just because a guitar tech or road manager needed the work.
It’s not clear why anyone should need to “get a pass”. It is one thing to criticise an actor or celebrity for promoting a defective, harmful, or fraudulent product or service, but the idea that they shouldn’t make the choice to use their celebrity to make ‘easy money’ when pretty much everyone else would be happy to win a lottery or receive a windfall from a long lost relative is pretty absurd unless your argument is that all profit is theft or some similarly Marxist philosophy.
As for Dame Dench, before she played the character of ‘M’ in the Bond franchise she was basically one of the least known “Great Actors” on the British theatre scene and almost no one outside of the West End scene had every heard of her because she spent decades on stage earning a pittance, supplemented by the occasional appearance as a guest star on a BBC programme or in mostly shitty movies to make a living. Appearing in a Bond film is tantamount to selling her talent for an cash grab (even through she was easily the best thing about the Brosnan-era films) and many Bond films are little more than extended commercials noted for their pervasive product placement anyway, but it allowed her to parlay that exposure into the opportunity to work in and promote more stage productions, even though these probably did not benefit her financially in any way. If she elects to spend her twilight years doing commercial work for great pay, more power to her because there are few actors more deserving or who have done more to promote sustain live theatre.
Stranger
I think you’re underestimating the fame that results from a starring role in a leading sitcom like As Time Goes By.
You should also take into account the British actors, especially those “of an age” tend to regard acting as a job, not an artistic calling. Meaning a job’s a job. You show up, know your lines and cash the check. Work is work.
Was going to say the same thing, even as barely a teenager, I recognised her from that when she got the M role.
A lot of good responses so far.
I used to have a friend who was (IMO) quite wealthy and successful, involved in hedge funds. He moved in what seemed to me quite rarified circles, but he was clearly the smallest fish in those pools, servicing the ultra-wealthy. I remember him telling me, after some completely over-the-top vacation, of his wealthier acquaintances saying, “Imagine how much fun we’ll have when you make REAL money!”
$10 mill might seem like quite a bit to most of us, but $20, $50, or $100 is even more, and opens up more opportunities.
I’ve never heard of it, and a cursory look seems to indicate that it didn’t get distribution outside of the Commonwealth until Dench became known for her work on the Bond franchise, which I strongly suspect is where the wider popular awareness of her work came from. I doubt that alone would give her the ability to command substantial fees for doing commercial work.
Stranger
For context, the story behind this ad campaign is that it’s not the real Tommy Lee Jones. It’s an alien who’s been sent to Earth to observe. And the alien learned about Earth from watching movies so it disguised itself as a famous actor.
Judi Dench was widely known and admired long before her sunset role in the Bond movies. The general reaction was: “Holy shit! Judi Dench is M now!”
That’s my memory as well and I am not particularly well versed in movie stars. Then I looked at her wikipedia page and I don’t know how I would have known her before.
Probably from playing Titania in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”. She spent the movie wearing nothing but green paint and strategically placed fig leaves.
My friend’s father when I was growing up was a working actor. He was never a star but he was in lots of things in the 70s and 80s to the point that you would recognize him back then. He would do commercials but he wouldn’t do them if they were going to be shown in the L.A. area because he felt that it would be embarrassing and would hurt him getting other work. That may have been the prevailing view at the time but then again Orson Welles did Gallo Wine commercials.