Cate Blanchett in the Watch What Happens Live studioCate Blanchett has claimed her pay packet for her part in the Lord Of The Rings trilogy wasn’t quite as hefty as you might have expected.
The Australian actor appeared in all three of Peter Jackson’s adaptations of the classic Tolkien stories as the elf leader Galadriel, later reprising the role in the recent Hobbit prequels.
During an interview on Watch What Happens Live, Andy Cohen questioned which one of Cate’s films earned her the biggest pay-out, before suggesting it was probably Lord Of The Rings.
“Are you kidding me? No!” she insisted, claiming that nobody in the cast “got paid anything to do that movie”.
When Andy questioned if she did get “a piece of the back-end”, she added: “No! That was way before any of that.”
Instead, Cate claimed, she did the film because she wanted to “work with the guy who made Braindead”, the 1992 zombie comedy Peter Jackson directed earlier on in his career.
Cate Blanchett and Elijah Wood in the first Lord Of The Rings movie“I basically got free sandwiches – they fed me – and I got to keep my ears, which is something,” she added.
Pressed again on which film from her vast oeuvre did pay the most, Cate concluded: “Women don’t get paid as much as you think they do.”
Elsewhere in the Watch What Happens Live segment, Cate pleaded the fifth when put on the spot about which of her male co-stars was the “most high maintenance”, and also swerved a question about the film wig that she was most displeased with.
Watch the full segment in the video below:
