The White Lotus star Tom Hollander says he was humbled to see the enormous sum Spider-Man star Tom Holland was set to receive as a box office bonus for an Avengers film … when it was sent to him by mistake.
Feud: Capote vs. The Swans star Tom Hollander — perhaps best known for The White Lotus and Pride & Prejudice — is also now known for having a name very similar to a certain wall-crawling Marvel star — and he almost got the box office bonus to prove it!
In a hilariously awkward story he shared with Seth Meyers on Late Night, Hollander peeled back the curtain a bit on the kinds of bonuses Marvel stars like Tom Holland are getting for the studio’s blockbuster franchises when he shared a very humbling mistake.
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The actor talked about how he was going to see a friend of his in a theatrical production who was making 300 pounds a week, noting that he “sat smugly in the audience having just done a BBC show for 30 grand or something.”
Hollander anticipated the payday helping him get through the next year and was feeling pretty good about his situation. “I was thinking, ‘Well this is marvelous. I’m very prosperous, but my good friend … is doing this great play and I’m going to go afterwards and see him and slightly patronize him and say how wonderful it was.'”
But during intermission, Hollander checked his phone and saw something completely unexpected: an email from his agency that read, “Payment advice slip: Your first box office bonus for The Avengers. And I thought, ‘I don’t think I’m in The Avengers.'”
Then he saw how much it was for. “It was an astonishing amount of money,” he shared. “And it was not his salary, it was his first box office bonus. Not the whole box office, the first one.”
“And it was more money than I’ve ever — it was a seven-figure sum,” Hollander continued. “He was 20 or something. So my feeling of smugness that you remember I had in the first half disappeared very quickly.”
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Hollander joked that he was here first. The revered actor has been active in films, television and the theater since he was a teenager in the early 1980s, more than ten years before Holland was even born. Now, though, he finds himself awkwardly mistaken for him “in non-visual contexts.”
He said the most uncomfortable moments involve the little ones. “I’m introduced to somebody’s very, very excited, then confused, then disappointed children,” he shared. “They go, ‘My children are so excited to meet you.’ And I go, ‘Are they, though?'”
He said he tries to convince the parents they’ve got it wrong, but they often insist and so he steels himself for the inevitable. “They come out and they go, ‘Where is he? Where is he?'” Hollander said. “And they go, ‘No, no.'”
Tom Hollander’s next role is still not a famous spider-themed superhero, but it is someone just about as famous. He’s taking the lead role as Truman Capote in the next season of Ryan Murphy and FX’s Feud: Capote vs. the Swans.
The new season, which premieres January 31 at 10pm ET, also stars Naomi Watts, Diane Lane, Chloë Sevigny, Calista Flockhart, Demi Moore, Molly Ringwald, and Treat Williams.
