White Lotus star Tom Hollander has revealed he was once accidentally sent the payslip for Tom Holland’s seven-figure Avengers bonus.
Appearing on US talk show Late Night With Seth Meyers, the 56-year-old British actor recounted how he has been often been mistaken for the 27-year-old Spider-Man star in “non-visual contexts”.
Hollander, who also appeared in Pirates Of The Caribbean and Pride And Prejudice, explained things got especially confusing when they shared an agent for a period.
“It’s been very difficult, because you know I was here first, but he’s enormously famous,” he told Meyers.
“I don’t actually get mistaken for him, but in non-visual contexts I get mistaken for him all the time.”
He recalled that the accounts staff of his agency made a particular blunder with their payslips on one occasion.
Explaining how he discovered the error, Hollander said he had been watching a friend in a theatre show who was being paid £300 a week.
He recalled: “I sat smugly in the audience having just done a BBC show for £30,000 or something which was going to get me through the next year or so, and I was thinking, ‘Well, this is marvellous, I’m very prosperous’.
“But my good friend Peter, who is doing this great play, and I’m going to go afterwards and see him and slightly patronise him and say how wonderful it was.”
Hollander said he later checked his emails at the interval and saw one containing a payslip labelled “your first box office bonus for The Avengers”.
The actor told the host it was an “astonishing amount of money”.
He added: “And 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… It was a seven-figure sum.”
“So my feeling of smugness that you remember I had in the first half, disappeared very quickly,” he added.
Holland has played Spider-Man in six Marvel Cinematic Universe films including two Avengers blockbusters – Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame.
The actor has also starred in three standalone Spider-Man films alongside his girlfriend, Euphoria star Zendaya.