“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. So much so that Hollander 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 £30,000 ($38,000) for his role in a television show while his friend was earning about £300 per week ($380) for performing in a play he was watching. “I sat smugly in the audience … and I was thinking ‘well, this is marvelous, I’m very prosperous,’” he said.
Hollander joked that he was preparing to “slightly patronize” his friend after the show, then checked his email during the interval. There, he found a message from his acting agency titled: “Payment advice slip, 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.
The Washington Post could not immediately verify Hollander’s claim of receiving notice of Holland’s financial bonus. Agents for both Holland and Hollander, as well as Disney, did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday.
Holland, as Spider-Man, has featured in other movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, including “Avengers: Infinity War” and “Avengers: Endgame.” A box-office bonus is an additional payment some studio give to actors when a movie’s earnings pass a certain financial threshold at the box office.
While Hollander did not specify which “Avengers” movie he was referring to, “Avengers: Infinity War,” which was released in 2018, grossed approximately $2 billion worldwide, according to Box Office Mojo.
In the interview, Hollander also told Meyers that he is often introduced to “very excited, then confused, then disappointed children” when they realize he is not Spider-Man.
He was on the show promoting his latest drama, “Feud: Capote vs. The Swans,” where he plays American writer Truman Capote.
It was his first time playing an American, Hollander said. “America is a wonderful, wonderful country so I liked pretending to be part of it for a minute,” he said.
Asked by Meyers why Brits so often take up American roles, Hollander quipped: “They do it for less … they’re just undercutting everyone.”