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Despite the Lord of the Rings trilogy being one of the most lucrative film series in history, Cate Blanchett has revealed that the earnings didn’t trickle down to the actors.
The two-time Academy Award winner, who portrayed the elf queen Galadriel in the Peter Jackson movies, made the admission during a game of Plead the Fifth on Wednesday’s (August 7) episode of Watch What Happens Live With Andy Cohen.
Joined by her Borderlands co-star Gina Gershon, Blanchett was asked which film has given her the biggest paycheck.
As she took a moment to think, Cohen interjected to suggest Lord of the Rings.
“Are you kidding me?” Blanchett replied. “No, no one got paid anything to do that movie.”
When Cohen asked if she had gotten a piece of the “backend,” she answered: “No! That was way before any of that. No, nothing.”
The Carol star, 55, explained her motivation to sign on to the movies was to “work with the guy who made Braindead.” Braindead was Jackson’s critically acclaimed 1992 zombie comedy film, released as Dead Alive in North America.
“I mean, I basically got free sandwiches,” Blanchett said of the Lord of the Rings production, adding: “Women don’t get paid as much as you think they do.”
The Lord of the Rings trilogy, which was released in the early Noughties, brought in $2.9bn worldwide.
Despite having earned very little for her role in the trilogy, the Australian actor has gone on to star in several Oscar-nominated movies, including Nightmare Alley, Tár and Don’t Look Up.
Blanchett currently leads Eli Roth’s new action sci-fi, Borderlands, which is based on the popular video game of the same name.
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The movie, which is out in theaters on Friday, August 9, already holds a dismal four percent critic’s score on Rotten Tomatoes at the time of writing.
“This Cate Blanchett video game adaptation is a total disaster,” The Independent’s Clarisse Loughrey wrote in her one-star review. “Wildly miscast actors and an impenetrable script make this long-delayed actioner alienating to fans of the game and incomprehensible to the casual viewer.”
Featuring a star-studded cast of Blanchett, Gershon, Jamie Lee Curtis, Ariana Greenblatt and Kevin Hart, the movie follows Blanchett’s Lilith, a bounty hunter who, after returning to her home planet of Pandora, teams up with a ragtag group of misfits to save a missing girl who holds the key to unimaginable power.
