Taraji P. Henson asked for $500,000 to play Brad Pitt's mother. She got $150,000 and says about $30,000 of it was left. The movie made $335 million.
In the video below, Gayle King asks if she's quitting acting. Taraji covers her face and cries before she can say a word. Then she does the math out loud.
In 2008 she was third on the call sheet for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, behind Pitt and Cate Blanchett. Her 2016 memoir says she'd been promised "somewhere in the mid six figures." At a 2023 SAG-AFTRA event she said she asked for $500,000 and was first offered $100,000.
It came up to $150,000 with a condition. She had to cover three months of New Orleans hotel bills herself. "Insult, meet injury," she wrote.
On The Real she did the sum. Half the $150,000 went to taxes. Her team took 30% of the full fee, $45,000. That left $30,000, and her son's school tuition that year was $30,000. "Literally, for five months, that's what I made."
The memoir puts her pay at less than 2% of what the studio paid the top name on that call sheet, Pitt.
She got an Oscar nomination for the role. Fifteen years later she said she almost walked away from The Color Purple over pay. That same month she told Gayle King: "Every time I do something and I break another glass ceiling, when it's time to renegotiate, I'm at the bottom again."
The case for the studio: Pitt sold the tickets, and she doesn't dispute his money. "They deserve to earn what they get," she said of Pitt and Blanchett.
Her side: "I too worked my ass off, and at the time I couldn't say no. I didn't have any power."
$335 million at the box office. An Oscar nomination. One year of school fees.
Every day, one star's real paycheck.
Was that Hollywood paying for box office power, or paying a Black woman less because it could?
I will repeat this, Conditions like Down syndrome, epilepsy and others are financially demanding to manage. Poor families often struggle to sustain the care victims need, and so theirs die young due to inadequate access to treatment.
You mostly see people living with these conditions among the wealthy coz they can afford long-term care. Yet idiots will always come up with theories that someone sacrificed such a child for wealth, forgetting that it's being wealthy that sustained the kid
Also some may be poor at the point of having such kids but because of the pressure and the responsibilities that come with raising such a kid, they go extra tough in looking for money, tame their manners and end up rich
This is where you village idiots come up with theories that such people gave in kids to Satan in exchange for riches
๐ช๐๐๐๐ก๐๐๐โ๐ฆ ๐ฅ๐๐ก๐ง๐๐ ๐๐๐ง ๐ก๐ข๐ช ๐๐๐๐ ๐๐ก ๐ฆ๐ช๐๐ง๐ญ๐๐ฅ๐๐๐ก๐.
For many years Wicknell claimed that he bought his Gulf Stream jet but now the jet is back in Switzerland where it was rented from.
This means that despite Wicknell claiming that he bought the jet, it was actually being rented from a Swiss company which has retaken the jet back.
I am appealing to any lift servicing company in Bulawayo to engage the management at Mpilo Central Hospital, so that the broken lift can be assessed and repaired. I will pay for the work from my own pocket.
Mpilo serves Bulawayo and the whole southern region of our country. Sick and elderly patients, pregnant women and people recovering from surgery should not be forced to struggle up and down stairs because a lift is not working.
Let us just fix things in our country and deal with the politics another day. Patients cannot wait for politicians to agree.
My offer is open ended. If you are a qualified lift company, or you know one in Bulawayo, please get in touch with me so that we can get this done. [email protected]
I do not know how many times I have to say this, that South Africa is not a xenophobic country. Like every other country in the world, it has some xenophobic people, but they do not define the nation.
I have used the 2024 election results to make this point. If South Africa were a xenophobic country, it would vote for xenophobic political parties. It does not. In 2024, the Patriotic Alliance and ActionSA, two parties known for their hard line on immigration, won only about 3% of the national vote between them.
Today's provisional results from the municipal elections tell the same story. Support for the Patriotic Alliance has grown, but it and ActionSA still hold only about 7% of the vote between them. The great majority of South Africans voted for other parties.
There are xenophobes in South Africa, just as there are racists in Zimbabwe and racists in Zambia and any other country for that matter. But you cannot call Zimbabwe a racist country, and you cannot call Zambia a racist country.
South Africa deserves the same fairness.
So stop giving your country this backward badge of honour, it is not a xenophobic country!
Your president is a coin flip away from nuking a mountain in Iran and starting World War III. We want you to stop electing lunatics that might kill us all.
Her parents even stopped having children when her younger sister was born to secure her throne because under Spanish law if a boy is born after a girl he has a right to the throne, that's how her father came to the throne instead of his older sisters