11 Movie Actors Who Were Paid The Biggest Salary Per Words
Jack Nicholson, Tom Cruise, Johnny Depp and those other names who made huge pay-per-word amounts!
The movie business is one famed for some of the astronomical paydays experienced by a countless number of its stars. Once you make it in Hollywood, the world really is your oyster when it comes to bringing in earnings that would legitimately set you and future generations up for life.
Some stars have to memorize huge amounts of dialogue or partake in intense physicality to earn their paychecks, while others, quite frankly, get paid a lot for doing very little - a prime example of this being Marlon Brando picking up $3.7 million for not even 20 minutes of screen time in Superman II.
It's the dialogue front that the attention is on here, those coveted roles that involve big pay but relatively little speaking. That's not to say that the actors in question don't earn their money in these roles, it's just that a breakdown of pay-per-words - with 247wallst and GQ being major resources for such research - puts an entirely different spin on things.
There are some truly staggering numbers here, and there are also so many other actors and roles that were so, so close to making the cut, such as Leonardo DiCaprio in The Revenant, Sean Connery in The Rock, and Will Smith in Independence Day.
Here, then, are 11 actors who were paid some crazy amounts of money to speak not all that much dialogue.
11. Tom Cruise - $20,194 Per Word For Mission: Impossible II
For his work on the Mission: Impossible franchise, Tom Cruise has made an insane amount of money.
Across the six films to date, Cruise has tended to have a standard upfront fee of somewhere between $12 million - $30 million, yet additional fees and box office percentages have seen the actor make nearly $300 million combined across those six pictures.
One of the most financially beneficial of the Mission: Impossible films for Cruise was 2000's Mission: Impossible II. By the time the dust settled, the actor is believed to have pocketed an eye-watering $75 million from that sequel.
In a film that had Cruise speak a grand total of 3,714 words, that breaks down to a hearty $20,194 per word for the franchise star's second outing as Ethan Hunt.
With the hefty box office hauls that the Mission: Impossible franchise brings in, it makes absolute sense for Paramount to already be at work on a seventh and eighth installment in the series. Likewise, with such major paydays - largely made up from back-end earnings - it's easy to see why Tom Cruise is always happy to get back in the Ethan Hunt saddle.