Cate Blanchett Says She Was Paid In Sandwiches For 'Lord Of The Rings'

By Andrew Sanford | Celebrity | August 9, 2024 |

By Andrew Sanford | Celebrity | August 9, 2024 |

Sylvester Stallone was offered $12 million to star in Over The Top, an arm-wrestling movie, in 1984. That’s a lot of money to star in a movie now, much more so forty years ago. While any actor would be happy to be paid that today, salaries have grown even more; Especially for big franchise films. He’s a smidge of an outlier, but Robert Downey Jr. is reportedly getting paid North of $80 million to play Doctor Doom in two new Avengers films. That is considerably more than Cate Blanchett made filming Lord of The freaking Rings.

Blanchett was not a lead in Lord Of The Rings. I know that. She is also prominently featured. She had already been nominated for an Academy Award. She was a star and would be appearing in three huge movies. The films were a massive undertaking, but still, they were also seen as a risk. New Line Cinema bet the farm on the films being successful, succeeded and still had to merge with Warner Bros less than a decade later. Regardless, Blanchett should have been paid more than what she has revealed.

The actress recently sat down with Andy Cohen to promote Borderlands (which she hopefully got paid a lot for). When playing a game of Plead The Fifth, Cohen asked Blanchett which film brought her her “biggest paycheck.” She asked him to guess, and when the host picked Lord Of The Rings, she shut him down real quick. “Are you kidding me?” Blanchett asked. “No, no one got paid anything to do that movie.”

Cohen asked the Elizabeth star if she had been given a cut of the box office, but the answer was no. “No, that was way before any of that,” she explained. It wasn’t all bad. The films certainly raised Blanchett’s already rising profile. She was likely paid more for appearing in the Hobbit films. And she “wanted to work with the guy who made Braindead,” which she got to do! And it’s awesome that she likes that movie! Still, the initial experience was not a financially fulfilling one. “I basically got free sandwiches,” Blanchett continued. “And I got to keep my ears.”

The ears are a good get, but the whole thing is still ridiculous. It is also part of a larger, shittier trend in Hollywood that Blanchett points out in the interview. At one point, she made sure to reiterate, “No one got paid anything,” and said later, “Women don’t get paid as much as you think they do.” She shouldn’t have to point out something that obvious, but some people clearly need to hear it.