Given what they actually do, actors get paid a hell of a lot of money. These aren't people who spend their days fighting terrorism or performing heart surgery or trying to cure mankind of its most irksome diseases - these are folk who just, you know, pretend to be other people for a living - and to a relatively convincing degree. As is often also thought to be the case with athletes, there's a consensus among us normal folk that actors get paid way, way too much. But we love our movie stars, don't we? We love the way they light up the screen, year after year, to bring us fun and frolics. And its the best actors - the ones who are able to consistently deliver movies that force us to idolise them - who earn the biggest pay-checks, right? Big box office equals better salaries? Forbes recently unveiled their list of the 10 highest-paid actors in the world, and whilst a good number of actors featured on the list were deserving, you might find some of the results a little surprising. To celebrate the unveiling of said list, then, we've opted to rank all the actors from best to work; who deserves all that cash... and who plainly doesn't?
Sam Hill is an ardent cinephile and has been writing about film professionally since 2008. He harbours a particular fondness for western and sci-fi movies.
