“Are You Kidding Me?”: Original Galadriel’s Cate Blanchett Reflects On Low Pay For Lord Of The Rings Movies

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“Are You Kidding Me?”: Original Galadriel’s Cate Blanchett Reflects On Low Pay For Lord Of The Rings Movies


Summary

  • Cate Blanchett reveals that she was paid very little for playing Galadriel in Lord of the Rings, including no backend pay based on box office.
  • Blanchett took the role because she wanted to work with Peter Jackson.
  • The Lord of the Rings cast featured mostly unknown actors at the time, meaning most didn’t command high movie-star salaries.

Lord of the Rings star Cate Blanchett recalls her low salary for appearing in Peter Jackson’s beloved trilogy. Based on the books by J.R.R. Tolkien, the first installment in Jackson’s trilogy was released in 2001, introducing audiences to Elijah Wood’s Frodo as he embarks on an epic quest to destroy the One Ring. The Lord of the Rings cast includes a host of talented actors, with Blanchett playing a memorable role as Elven queen Galadriel during The Fellowship of the Ring‘s Lothlórien sequence, a character she would revisit in the latter two films and Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy.

During a recent interview on Watch What Happens Live, host Andy Cohen asks Blanchett about the highest paycheck she ever received for a movie, guessing the answer to be Lord of the Rings.

Blanchett, however, corrects Cohen, revealing that she was actually paid relatively little for her role as Galadriel in Jackson’s trilogy. When the host asks if Blanchett got any of the backend profits, the actor replies: “No! That was way before any of that, you know, no, nothing.” Check out Blanchett’s other comments about her Lord of the Rings pay:

“Are you kidding me? No, no one got paid anything to do that movie.

“I wanted to work with the guy who made Braindead. I mean, I basically got free sandwiches and I got to keep my ears… No, no one got paid anything. Women don’t get paid as much as you think they do.”

Also known as Dead Alive, 1992’s Braindead, a zombie movie, marks Jackson’s third feature film.

Cate Blanchett Isn’t The Only Lord Of The Rings Actor To Talk About Low Pay

Why Some Actor Salaries Were So Low

Collectively, the three Lord of the Rings movies grossed close to $3 billion worldwide, making the trilogy a massive success. Before the release of The Fellowship of the Ring, however, the project was seen as a fairly big risk. The three movies were all shot simultaneously in New Zealand with an estimated collective budget of roughly $281 million. Most of the core cast members, too, though now widely recognizable, were mostly unknowns at the time.

Eomer and the Master of Lake Town

Related


Lord Of The Rings: 10 Actors You Forgot Were In The Movies

From Stephen Fry to Karl Urban, some Lord of the Rings fans may have forgotten that these actors had significant roles in the movies.

In an interview on The Howard Stern Show in 2019, Orlando Bloom reveals that he was only paid $175,000 to appear as Legolas in all three movies. Though Bloom is very much a star now, he wasn’t really a known quantity at the time, and he therefore commanded a lower salary. A Lord of the Rings actor like Viggo Mortensen hasn’t publicly revealed his salary for the three films, but he was, like Bloom, not a big name actor in the early 2000s, meaning he probably wasn’t paid a significant amount more.

In his Howard Stern interview, Bloom called the Lord of the Rings movies the “greatest gift of [his] life” and that he’d do it again for half the money.

With Lord of the Rings, Jackson had the tall order of depicting massive battles and bringing the fantastical world of Middle-earth to life. Evidently, one way that the director was able to put most of the budget onto the screen was by not hiring massive Hollywood stars. Lord of the Rings actors like Blanchett, Wood, and Bloom, however, were surely paid far more to reprise their respective roles in the Hobbit trilogy years later.

Source: Watch What Happens Live



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