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?
Pudgie tried convincing Ice Cube to cast him in ‘Last Friday’ by acting out a scene with his best LA accent, but Funny Marco kept trying to SABOTAGE his audition and ended up stealing the opportunity for himself 😭😭
Sometimes your masculine urges tell u to just impregnate her belly directly. And all that extra bellyfat must feel so warm wrapped around his this smelly aperod 😩🍆🖤 #tabookink#taboocaptions#goonerthoughts
So he like “ oouu shit bae I’m boutta nut “
I knew he was bc it was 2-3mins into the head session.... so he nuts in my mouth and I swallowed his kids 🤣😉. So he pull me up to him by my chin keeping eye contact... and oof lord that is so attractive , so y’all know.
#bj#ebony
At 20 Ice Cube turned down $75,000 because nobody would let his lawyer read the contract.
He’d been paid about $32,000 for writing much of N.W.A’s biggest music.
In the video below, Cube tells how he walked out, and how long it took to answer the friends who called him a traitor.
Cube kept asking manager Jerry Heller to send the contract to his lawyer. Heller said it was on its way.
So Cube tried a trick. “Just send it to my mama.”
Heller wouldn’t even do that.
“I can’t sign that,” Cube said. His bandmates laughed at him. Who turns down $75,000?
He walked out of the biggest group in rap.
N.W.A answered on their next record. They called him Benedict Arnold.
His label tried to calm him. He had just torn up their office with a bat. So an executive took him out on a boat and played him the diss in the middle of the water. Three more hours to the dock.
By the time he got home, it was ready to come out. “No Vaseline” took him 90 minutes.
In fairness, $75,000 was a fortune for a kid from Compton in 1989. And N.W.A’s next album went to No. 1 without him.
Years later, Cube says, he ran into Eazy E at a New York club called The Tunnel. They talked about a reunion. It was the last time he saw him alive.
In 2015, Cube produced Straight Outta Compton, the movie about the group that called him a traitor. It made about $200 million.
This time, his lawyer read every page.
Who betrayed N.W.A: the 20 year old who wouldn’t sign, or the man who wouldn’t show him the contract?