Rebel Wilson has revealed that her earnings skyrocketed from $3,500 for her first film, Bridesmaids, to a whopping $10 million for Pitch Perfect 3 in her new memoir, Rebel Rising.
The actor, 44, recounts moving from Australia to the US in the book, including signing with agents at William Morris Endeavor and landing the role in Bridesmaids shortly after.
Writing about the beloved 2011 comedy, starring Kristen Wiig, Maya Rudolph, Rose Byrne, and Melissa McCarthy, Wilson said it was the “first opportunity in Hollywood that changed the trajectory of my whole career”.
The Aussie star said that her salary for Bridesmaids “didn’t matter” as it was enough to allow her to join the SAG-AFTRA union and continue working in Hollywood, an experience she described as “everything”.
However that was only the beginning of things to come as Wilson revealed she was cast in six films two weeks after Bridesmaids premiered, one of which was Pitch Perfect.
She reflected in her book about the musical movie franchise: “Boy, did that movie pay dividends!”
In an interview with The New York Times about her memoir, Wilson was asked about her decision to write candidly about some of the salaries she earned during her acting career thus far
Wilson recalled that she was able to negotiate her Pitch Perfect 3 salary up to $10 million after Universal Pictures initially proposed an offer $1 million lower due to the popularity of her character “Fat Amy”.
She told the outlet: “Universal Studios are incredible, but did they make a ton of money from the Pitch Perfect movies? Yes.”
“So despite me absolutely loving all those folks at Universal, did I use that leverage to my advantage? Yes. And in the 11th hour, I go, ‘You know, that’s a lovely offer of $9m. But I need one more to make it 10.’”
“That’s a big milestone when you’re an actor. To receive an eight-figure offer, for a woman, is huge. Sometimes women don’t like to talk about that. Whereas I don’t think the guys have any issues saying they get $20m a movie.”
Although the Pitch Perfect movies propelled Wilson to stardom, she reveals that portraying "Fat Amy" came with contractual obligations to maintain her weight at the time.
Her agency, she writes in the memoir, “liked me fat because they got hundreds of thousands of dollars in commission for each film where I played the fat funny girl”.
