Holland or Hollander? For two actors, a big difference
LONDON — On paper, they’re easy to confuse. Two British actors, both with the words “Tom Holland” in their name. In real life? Not so much.
Tom Hollander is a 56-year-old actor with roles in The White Lotus, Pride & Prejudice and the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, while Tom Holland is Spider-Man.
“In nonvisual contexts, I’m mistaken for him all the time,” Hollander said of Holland, 27, during an interview on Late Night With Seth Meyers this week. He said he once received a pay slip for a “seven-figure sum” intended for the other actor, he said.
In the interview, Hollander recalled feeling self-satisfied about being paid $38,000 for his role in a television show while his friend was earning about $380 per week for performing in a play. “I sat smugly in the audience … and I was thinking, ‘Well, this is marvelous. I’m very prosperous,’ ” he said.
Hollander joked he was preparing to “slightly patronize” his friend after the show until intermission, when he checked his email and found a message titled: “Your first box-office bonus for The Avengers,’ ” Hollander recalled.
“And I thought, ‘I don’t think I’m in The Avengers,’ ” he said.
“It was an astonishing amount of money,” Hollander said. “It was not his salary. It was his first box-office bonus. Not the whole box-office bonus, the first one — and it was more money than I’d ever [seen]. It was a seven-figure sum.”
“So my feeling of smugness … disappeared, very quickly,” he said, adding that Holland would have been about age 20 at the time.
“It was a terrible moment,” he joked.