The role Colin Farrell said he earned far too much money to play: “I got overpaid for it”
Nobody bats an eyelid when actors get paid millions of dollars for a single role, and things have reached such a point that nobody bats an eyelid when they get paid tens of millions of dollars, either. Colin Farrell was happy to accept such an offer on one occasion, even if he didn’t think he was worth it.
Of course, only an idiot would turn down an eye-watering sum of money because they thought the studio and financiers were overplaying their financial hand, so the star was well within his rights to accept the cash. He was glad that he did, too, because it was about the only positive to emerge from the whole experience.
With the benefit of hindsight, the confidence the key creatives involved in Oliver Stone’s Alexander had in the movie is laughable, but at the time, there was no reason why it couldn’t have lived up to its ambitions of conquering the box office and taking awards season by storm.
It was a passion project the three-time Academy Award-winning filmmaker had been nurturing for decades, and Hollywood had been more willing than it had been for decades to throw lavish amounts into blockbuster historical epics, with Ridley Scott’s Gladiator reigniting the swords-and-sandals craze.
Farrell – one of the industry’s fastest-rising stars at the time – led the line alongside an esteemed ensemble cast that included Angelina Jolie, Anthony Hopkins, Val Kilmer, Jared Leto, Rosario Dawson, and Brian Blessed, and it was nestled in a release date sweet spot that distanced it from the competition but put it right in the thick of the Oscars conversation.
Four months before Alexander hit cinemas in November 2004, Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy came within a whisker of earning half a billion dollars at the box office, so the appetite for star-stuffed epics was evidently still there. Unfortunately, Stone’s film was a disaster, losing a fortune, taking a pasting from critics and audiences, and gaining attention from the awards ceremony nobody wants to dominate.
The recipient of six Golden Raspberry Award nods, including ‘Worst Picture’, ‘Worst Director’, and ‘Worst Actor’, Farrell was left crushed by the Alexander ordeal. “It was heartbreaking it did not work,” he admitted to Movies. “All joking aside, it’s not a poor me story because, again, I got overpaid for it, and I had the most incredible life experience and shared it with a really cool bunch of people.”
Farrell has been open in reflecting on how much he was impacted by Alexander‘s failure, but considering he once said “I wasn’t going to give them their $20 million back” and the movie only made $167 million in ticket sales, based on nothing but the percentages, he was definitely overpaid.
