An original 'Lord of the Rings' star admitted in a recent interview that the cast wasn't "paid anything" for their work on Peter Jackson's iconic trilogy.
Lord of the Rings star Cate Blanchett got candid about her slim payday for the iconic franchise during an appearance on Watch What Happens Live! on August 7 to promote her upcoming action movie, Borderlands.
Host Andy Cohen asked Blanchett which of her films gave her the biggest paycheck, adding, “I think it’s probably Lord of the Rings.”
“Are you kidding me?” Blanchett scoffed. “No, no one got paid anything to do that movie.”
Cohen then asked Blanchett if she “got a piece of the backend,” meaning she took a reduced salary up front to instead cash in on a percentage of the film’s total earnings. But Blanchett shut that notion down, as well.
“No! That was way before any of that,” she explained, reiterating that she was paid “nothing” to play elf Galadriel.
Blanchett took the role not for a paycheck but to work with director Peter Jackson. “I wanted to work with the guy who made Braindead,” she said of Jackson’s hyper-gory, cult-classic 1992 zombie film.
“I basically got free sandwiches, and I got to keep my [elf] ears,” Blanchett concluded of her salary for the blockbuster trilogy. “Women don’t get paid as much as you think they do,” she added.
Indeed, much of Lord of the Rings’ central cast worked for a paltry salary in comparison to modern blockbuster payouts, such as Robert Downey Jr.’s rumored $80 million check for two upcoming Avengers movies.
Elijah Wood, the ensemble’s protagonist, reportedly earned about $250,000 for Fellowship of the Ring. He was one of the few stars that was able to renegotiate for a higher rate on the sequels, but his total salary for the original trilogy was only about $1 million. Sean Astin took home $250,000 for the three films. Orlando Bloom reportedly took even less, earning around $175,000 for the three films.
Ian McKellan was reportedly the highest-paid member of the original cast, earning a combined $13 million from Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers. That’s still a pretty small amount considering McKellan had already proved his blockbuster draw as Magneto in X-Men and was fresh off of a 1999 Oscar nomination (for Gods and Monsters) when he signed on to play Gandalf. As a point of comparison, Bloom went on to earn an estimated $30 million from three Pirates of the Caribbean movies, and he was still making significantly less than Johnny Depp.
The Lord of the Rings trilogy went on to gross $2.9 billion worldwide.
