Noah way! UK actor, 15, got £450k for role in The Undoing
HE was the breakout star of The Undoing, the twisting TV drama that left viewers on the edge of their seats until the very end.
And it’s not just his career that 15year-old British actor Noah Jupe has boosted with his acclaimed portrayal of schoolboy Henry in the six-part Sky miniseries.
The rising star, who played the son of Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant in the whodunit, was paid £454,000 ($600,0000) for his role, according to documents seen by showbusiness website TMZ.
According to his minor’s contract – signed when he was 13 and filed in the LA County Court – he was also given a New York apartment to stay in and a number of round-trip business class tickets for him and his family to New York.
The youngster, who went to school in Cheshire, now lives with his actress mother Katy Cavanagh, 46, who played Julie Carp in Coronation Street from 2008 to 2015 – and producer father Chris Jupe in London.
He had worked on a number of films before The Undoing, including horror hit A Quiet Place and the George Clooney- directed Suburbicon. His latest pay cheque is three times what he received for last year’s Oscar-nominated Ford v Ferrari, starring Matt Damon and Christian Bale.
And for playing the young version of Shia LaBoeuf in last year’s Honey Boy he was paid just £6,000 for three weeks’ work. Despite his rapid rise to fame, Noah is keeping his fledgling acting career in the US separate from his home and school life in the UK to maintain some normality.
‘It’s hard in the sense that there’s so much crazy stuff, so many crazy opportunities that I’ve been lucky enough to have during my journey, you could get lost,’ he told Variety. ‘This industry is a really easy place to just get lost in and enveloped by.
‘So for me it’s keeping those close, close friends and close, close family, keeping them and having a place to go back to where you can talk to people.’
He added: ‘There’s a lot of people out there who look like you can trust them but they can ruin your career in a day. It’s happened to a lot of people and you have to be wary of that.’ Noah, who has been keeping up with his studies ahead of his GCSEs next year, had small roles in series such as Downton Abbey and Penny Dreadful before getting his first big break in BBC1’s 2016 hit The Night Manager, starring Tom Hiddleston.
The following year he was cast in Clooney’s Suburbicon, opposite Matt Damon and Julianne Moore. An impressed Clooney recommended him to John Krasinski, who cast him in A Quiet Place. He has also starred opposite Julia Roberts in Wonder.
And while viewers were enthralled by The Undoing, Noah and his mother had just returned from the US where he had been shooting crime movie No Sudden Move for director Steven Soderbergh.