Which actor got paid the most for the least amount of screen time?
In 2016, Julia Roberts became the envy of every actor in Hollywood when she negotiated a ludicrously lucrative contract to lend her star power to an eminently forgettable romcom. Well, every actor except one.
Roberts’ enormous payday came about when director Garry Marshall, who launched her to superstardom with Pretty Woman and later reunited with her on Runaway Bride and Valentine’s Day, came to her with a proposition. He wanted her to shoot a small role for Mother’s Day, a spiritual sequel (of sorts) to Valentine’s Day, both of which cobbled together unbelievably starry casts for stories of intertwining romantic shenanigans. In total, Marshall only needed Roberts for four days, but she made sure they were worth her while – and then some.
After some intense negotiations, Roberts closed a deal that astonished Hollywood, with several of the industry trade publications lambasting it as “obscene”. Roberts didn’t care, though, and she knew her worth as an A-list icon, so she wound up laughing all the way to the bank with a cool $3million for those paltry four days. For all you mathematicians out there, that breaks down as $750,000 per day, which is the kind of sum most regular people would struggle to see in a decade, let alone one solitary day of work.
Considering Roberts’ appearance in Mother’s Day is a glorified cameo, and she’s only on-screen for a few minutes, it would surely stand to reason that she is the actor who was paid the most for the least amount of screentime. Right? Wrong. Astonishingly, the true holder of this dubious record blew Roberts’ eye-watering contract out of the water, despite being on-screen for a minuscule 39 seconds, and being significantly less of an A-list star. How did this happen, you may ask? Well, for most other actors, it would be impossible, but not for this beloved mainstay of one of Hollywood’s most enduring franchises.
So, who was paid the most for the least amount of screen time?
In case you didn’t catch my incredibly subtle gag there, the actor in question is one of the stars of Mission: Impossible, Tom Cruise’s three-decade extravaganza of increasingly perilous stunts and progressively impenetrable plots. Indeed, this star has been an integral cog in the machine in each one of the franchise’s eight instalments, and fans have come to demand his kindly, warm-hearted presence.
Fascinatingly, though, Ving Rhames’ participation as the stylish hacker Luther Stickell was initially going to be left out of one of the films. When the fourth instalment, Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, was coming together, Rhames tried to negotiate a bigger payday than the $3.5m he received for Mission: Impossible III. To his chagrin, the production of the fourth movie was such a clusterfuck, and the script changed so many times, that he soon found himself surplus to requirements. It’s not known exactly what happened, but Rhames told MovieWeb in 2010, “I will just say that the budget changed dramatically and I’ll leave it at that.”
However, as the movie proceeded into the final stretch of its shoot, Paramount must have gotten cold feet about the idea of casting Luther to the side completely. It probably thought the fans wouldn’t stand for it, and the whole movie may have been soured in their eyes with no Luther and his trendy headwear. Whether or not that’s entirely true is up for debate, but either way, when the studio went back to Rhames to ask if he’d consider a cameo, he knew he was in a good bargaining position.
So, when Paramount reportedly offered him $3m for two days’ work – half a million less than he got for the third film – he said no, and insisted on $7.7m instead. This number was confirmed by the star himself when promoting Death Race 2 in 2010. “There’s no misunderstanding – it’s $7.7million or no!”
Ultimately, the studio had played silly beggars for so long that it caved to his exorbitant demand, and Rhames earned a king’s ransom to make a cameo that amounted to little more than busting Tom Cruise’s chops while sipping a cold beer on a balmy Seattle night.
