Tom Hollander says he received seven-figure Avengers bonus meant for Tom Holland
British actor and White Lotus villain Tom Hollander often gets mistaken for Spiderman star Tom Holland, but occasionally it works in his favour – like when he got the other man’s sevenfigure film bonus.
“It’s been very difficult, because you know I was here first but he’s enormously famous,” Hollander told Late Night host Seth Meyers. “I don’t actually get mistaken for him, but in non-visual contexts I get mistaken for him all the time.”
Hollander, who also had turns in Pirates of the Caribbean and Pride and Prejudice, at one time shared an agent with the younger Marvel star.
The 56-year-old told Meyers how he got the mistaken bonus while watching a play in which a friend was acting for £300 a week. “I sat smugly in the audience having just done a BBC show for 30 grand or something which was gonna get me through the next year or so, and I was thinking ‘well this is marvellous, I’m very prosperous’ ...
“And I’m going to go afterwards and see him [my friend] and slightly patronise him and say how wonderful it was. And then the interval came and I thought I’d check my emails.”
That was when he found the message containing a payslip – intended for Holland – labelled as the first tranche of a box office bonus for The Avengers.
“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.”
“My feeling of smugness disappeared,” he said.
Hollander also said he was sometimes introduced to “excited, then confused, then disappointed children” who probably thought they were meeting Spider-Man.
Hollander was promoting his forthcoming series Feud: Capote vs. The Swans, in which he plays American writer Truman Capote.