The overlooked 1994 role Bruce Willis took a $15m pay cut to play: “You’re out of your mind”
Any actor who can command a $15million salary for making a movie is well within their rights to command a $15m salary for making a movie, but instead of flexing his A-list muscle, Bruce Willis took a massive pay cut to work for little more than pennies.
It’s not like he needed the money, since he’d grown accustomed to being one of the industry’s highest-paid stars since 1988, when studio executives were up in arms over the second-billed cast member of Moonlighting netting $5 million for headlining a mid-budget action flick called Die Hard.
Obviously, when John McTiernan’s classic took off at the box office and became the most influential actioner of its era, turning Willis into a big-screen leading man and a genre icon in the process, he looked worth every penny. From then on, almost without exception, a major role required a major cash injection.
That said, 1994 was a strange year. In 1993, he pocketed $10m to headline the woeful Striking Distance, and he’d agreed a $15m deal to return as John McClane in Die Hard with a Vengeance. In between those two points, though, Willis developed a habit of working for a drastically reduced rate.
Pulp Fiction was profitable before it was released, thanks to him, with the star’s name value securing lucrative overseas distribution deals for Quentin Tarantino’s sophomore picture. Willis was paid $800,000 upfront for playing Butch Coolidge, but made a tidy sum from the profits.
For Rob Reiner’s reprehensible North, he negotiated a $5m payday, and another $15m for the shockingly bad erotic thriller, Color of Night, which won the Razzie for ‘Worst Picture’. For his fourth and final release of the year, the Paul Newman-led dramedy Nobody’s Fool, he was paid $1,400 a week.
He was so desperate to work with the legendary veteran that he took the SAG-AFTRA scale payment instead of anything remotely close to his usual fee. The movie was shot between November 1993 and February 1994, so if he was on set every week, which he probably wasn’t, the most he could have earned was around $20,000, or roughly 0.13% of his typical going rate.
To make matters even worse for his agent, Willis wasn’t featured in the marketing, either. His name was omitted from the trailers, posters, and even the opening credits of Nobody’s Fool, and when he told his team that he was happy to forego his spot in the promos, they only had one question: “He said, ‘You’re out of your mind,'” the actor recalled.
Newman was impressed, telling his co-star that it was “the gutsiest thing I’ve heard anyone say for a long time.” Having been so determined to appear in the film, whatever the cost, or lack of cost, to be more accurate, it’s no surprise that Willis considered it to be one of his most overlooked and underrated works.
