Wes Anderson’s 2001 movie “The Royal Tenenbaums” featured a mix of veteran Hollywood actors and rising stars, and they all walked away with the same paycheck.
In an interview with The Sunday Times, Anderson remembered how his flat-fee salary approach became a point of contention for its star, two-time Oscar winner Gene Hackman.
“Gene was very annoyed about the money,” the filmmaker recalled. “He was furious. Also, he didn’t want to do the film anyway. I talked him into it — I just didn’t go away.”
Hackman eventually accepted the role — and the salary —after the rest of the cast, including Gwenyth Paltrow, Angelica Huston, and Ben Stiller, all agreed to accept the same, undisclosed amount.
The filmmaker said after filming ended, Hackman, who died in February at age 95, “left without saying goodbye.”
“He was grumpy — we had friction,” Anderson said, referring to the well-chronicled tension between him and Hackman during production.
Anderson previously spoke about Hackman’s performance in the film during a Q&A following a 20th anniversary screening of it at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2021.
At the event, attended by Business Insider, Anderson said that Hackman “gave us everything he had” for “that small amount of money.”
Touchstone Pictures
Alec Baldwin, who narrated the film and moderated the Tribeca panel, joked that Hackman’s agent once told him the actor didn’t “open his eyes for less than $3 million.”
“The Royal Tenenbaums” was one of Hackman’s last major roles. He’s not the only actor to accept a surprisingly low Hollywood payday.
Elijah Wood recently told BI that his paycheck for starring in all three “Lord of the Rings” movies in the trilogy was low. His costar Cate Blanchett previously joked that her pay for being in the films was that she “basically got free sandwiches.”
Wood said that the sprawling Peter Jackson-directed fantasy trilogy was “a real gamble” for the studio financing the film, one that he said was mitigated by “not massive salaries.”
Anderson told the Sunday Times his flat-payment model with his 1998 film “Rushmore.”
It appears to have continued — Bryan Cranston told IndieWire that the cast of Anderson’s 2023 movie “Asteroid City” operated with no hierarchy or call sheet that placed the most important — and best-paid — actors at the top.
A Variety cover story reported that Scarlett Johansson accepted a salary of $4,131 a week while shooting the film. Edward Norton told Entertainment Weekly he earned a similar figure for appearing in Anderson’s 2012 film “Moonrise Kingdom.”
HBO’s Emmy Award-winning series “The White Lotus,” which recently aired its third season, has a similar parity model, according to one of its producers, David Bernad.
“They get paid the same, and we do alphabetical billing, so you’re getting people who want to do the project for the right reasons,” he said in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter.
Similarly, the 2023 Oscar-nominated film “Sing Sing” paid everyone on set — from the lead star Colman Domingo to PAs — the same daily wage.