10 Co-Stars Paid Vastly Different Salaries For The Same Film

The business of Hollywood sure is a strange, er, business, and as outside observers, it's often baffling for us to see how producers and studios come up with the numbers they do for building budgets and paying their talent.

All workers of course deserve to be compensated with a fair wage for their work, with some allowances made for any added value a given actor might bring to a project.

But sometimes the gap between co-stars' salaries is so mind-bogglingly huge, it can raise eyebrows.

Such is definitely the case with these 10 movies, where a pair of actors were paid amounts that were orders of magnitude different to one another, enough that it didn't really appear to make much sense at all.

Even accepting that in most instances one actor was considerably more famous than the other, given the relative size of their roles, the differing salaries can't help but seem excessively out of whack.

In the very least, most of these films served as stepping stones for the underpaid actors in question to graduate onto more well-minted endeavours, even if they definitely got low-balled all the same.

Even accepting that Jim Carrey was categorically The Star of Dumb and Dumber, Jeff Daniels not only shares near-equal screen time with him throughout the zany '90s comedy, but was a decorated dramatic actor in his own right.

With two Golden Globe nominations to his name and a bevy of memorable roles in hit movies in the decade leading up to Dumb and Dumber, it was reasonable to assume that Daniels was at least paid a decent rate befitting his status, even if not the megabucks salary of his co-star.

Indeed, Carrey was paid an eye-watering $7 million - almost half the film's budget - to play Lloyd Christmas due to the prior success of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. Daniels, meanwhile, was offered a paltry $50,000 for the role of Harry Dunne. To be clear, that's 0.007% of Carrey's take-home pay.

Was Carrey really worth 140x more than Daniels? Well, New Line Cinema's brass actually didn't want to cast Daniels in the movie at all, feeling that he was better known for his dramatic work than comedy, and so intentionally low-balled him with the expectation that he wouldn't take it.

And yet, Daniels was keen enough for the part - despite his agent trying to persuade him otherwise - that he accepted the lousy offer, and the rest is history.

On the flip side, Dumb and Dumber introduced Daniels to a whole new audience of moviegoers and only good did things for his career in the long run. Plus, it's reasonable to assume that he got a tasty raise for 2014's belated sequel, Dumb and Dumber To.