Which actor has turned down the biggest paycheque for a single movie?
It’s no secret that Hollywood’s biggest stars can make a big buck. Blockbuster movies are backed by eye-watering budgets, sometimes clocking in at hundreds of millions. But when trying to score a big name to join the last, a lot of that can be spent instantly on one actor.
It’s rumoured that the most money an actor has ever been paid to star in a movie was Tom Cruise’s salary for Top Gun: Maverick. To get the actor to return to the franchise, he was allegedly offered $13million upfront and a backend deal that will earn him over $100m when accounting for box office and home rental sales.
But what about actors who have turned down roles? When bargaining to try and get a big name to sign onto a movie, studios can end up raising and raising their offer to absurd numbers, even sometimes to no avail.
There are several examples of this happening. Before Christian Bale signed on to play Patrick Bateman in American Psycho, Leonardo DiCaprio was reportedly offered $21m for the role back in 2000, making it equivalent to over $37m today.
Similarly, despite now being best known for his role in The Matrix, Keanu Reeves was not their first choice. The studio allegedly offered Will Smith $35m to play Neo/Thomas Anderson, but apparently, Smith simply wasn’t impressed by the script.
Another instance in which film history could have been very different relates to Forrest Gump. Imagine a world where, instead of Tom Hanks, the iconic role was played by John Travolta. The star was supposedly offered a massive sum of $70m but instead turned down the role to star in Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. Travolta was only paid $150,000 for Pulp Fiction but was struggling to find work at the time. He hoped the edgier Tarantino part might put him back on the radar – which, of course, it did. As Vincent Vega, Travolta appears in several of the movie’s most iconic scenes, especially the diner dance. Getting his career back on track and giving him one of his most notable roles, he doesn’t seem to regret the decision.
Russell Crowe, however, almost tops the list after being offered $100m to star in Lord Of The Rings. But the actor who turned down the biggest paycheque was Matt Damon.
“I’ve left more money on the table than any actor,” Matt Damon said when revealing the offer he received to star in James Cameron’s Avatar. The film was pioneering in the world of special effects and animation. Cameron had been working on the vision for years, waiting for technology to catch up with his ideas. When it did, 20th Century Fox even fronted him $10m just to create a proof-of-concept clip in 2005.
With no real idea of how the film would be received or if the idea would work, signing onto the project would’ve been a big risk for Damon. Especially since his salary wasn’t set, but would give him 10% of all the film profits.
In the end, Damon had to commit to another Jason Bourne film, and Sam Worthington took the role. But in the years since the film’s release, it’s calculated that Damon missed out on over $250m worth of profit, with that number still growing today.
Damon has expressed regrets about turning down the project, to which Cameron told the BBC, “He’s beating himself up over this. And I really think you know, ‘Matt, you’re kind of like one of the biggest movie stars in the world, get over it.’” But how do you ever get over losing out on a sum so high?
