The co-star Will Smith always felt sorry for: “I felt bad taking most of the money”
Since the mid-1990s, there haven’t been many actors who’ve co-starred in a movie alongside Will Smith and been the highest-paid member of the cast, which is par for the course when the former ‘Fresh Prince’ has been of millions of dollars per picture from Michael Bay’s Bad Boys onward.
He earned the right to command such hefty fees by being the single biggest and most bankable star on the planet for over a decade, with his presence often enough to guarantee at least $100 million in ticket sales, and frequently much, much more, so he didn’t have to feel bad for anyone who was making less.
Smith probably didn’t, either, because he knew that his name was above the title, he was the focal point of the marketing, and the vast majority of audience members were showing up to see him, not the supporting actors, guest stars, or character performers who populated the rest of the ensemble.
However, he did show some humility once, because a co-star was suffering for their art at a fraction of the price. All the Academy Award winner and Chris Rock-slapper needed to do was show up, sit in the makeup chair for a little bit, head to the set, shoot his scenes, call it a day, and then return to this trailer.
Meanwhile, poor old Joel Edgerton wasn’t quite as fortunate. In David Ayer’s Bright, which instigated a massive sea change in cinema as Netflix’s first-ever big-budget original blockbuster with an A-lister in the leading role, Smith played a human cop opposite Edgerton’s orc officer in a dull slab of fantastical nonsense.
Smith was paid an eye-watering $27m upfront salary to play Daryl Ward in a film that everyone forgot about within a couple of weeks of its release, and while Edgerton’s paycheque was never officially disclosed, it would have been a fraction of that. To add time-consuming insult to financial injury, he spent at least three hours a day being transformed into an orc for the duration of the 60-day shoot.
When the Oscars exile was promoting the “fun and bizarre action movie” which was really neither of those things, since it was more dull and unrealised, he confessed that he was wracked with some semblance of guilt toward Edgerton, who needed to arrive a long time before Smith did.
“I’d just turn up ready to go; it made him cross,” he confessed. “I felt bad taking most of the money!” He may have said that, but he probably didn’t. After all, if you were being paid eight figures to not look like an orc while your colleague was earning much less money for a significantly more time-consuming process, would you really be that bothered?
Smith claimed he was anyway, and in the end, Edgerton’s sacrifice was for nothing. Netflix’s major investment in Bright didn’t pay off, with an announced sequel being scrapped by the streaming service, and less than a decade after its release, the genre-bender isn’t a movie that anyone ever talks about.
