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Reshooting sections of a movie is always expensive, but that was especially true for All the Money in the World. After sexual assault allegations against Kevin Spacey surfaced in early November, director Ridley Scott elected to reshoot Spacey’s scenes in the historical drama, with Christopher Plummer taking over the role of mogul J. Paul Getty.
The reshoots, which took place in late November, reportedly cost $10 million, and in December Scott told USA Today that the budget was “expensive but not as expensive as you think” because “everyone did it for nothing.” While Plummer and the crew got paid, Scott refused payment, he said at the time, and so did star Michelle Williams.
“I said I’d be wherever they needed me, whenever they needed me,” she told USA Today in December. “And they could have my salary, they could have my holiday, whatever they wanted. Because I appreciated so much that they were making this massive effort.”
It turns out that Williams, who plays the lead character in the film, actually did get paid for the reshoots — a nominal fee of a little less than $1,000, about $80 per day (about the minimum allowed by SAG-AFTRA). Meanwhile, supporting actor Mark Wahlberg, who’s made no such statement regarding the reshoot or his fee, received a payout that eclipsed Williams’s by a factor of 1,500.
On January 9, USA Today reported that Wahlberg earned $1.5 million for the reshoot, which constitutes 15 percent of the reshoot budget. That means Williams made less than 0.1 percent of Wahlberg’s salary for the reshoot.
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That’s electrifying enough on its own; what’s more startling is that both actors are represented by the same agency, William Morris Endeavor, and Williams reportedly was not told that Wahlberg’s representatives had negotiated the hefty fee for him.
While All the Money in the World is garnering fair to middling reviews from critics (including me), many reviews praise Williams’s and Plummer’s performances. Williams, Plummer, and Scott were all nominated for Golden Globes. But more than a few critics have pointed to Wahlberg’s performance as a low point in the movie.
USA Today’s reporting came on the heels of pointed jabs at the gender pay gap in Hollywood at Sunday’s Golden Globes. And while it’s not particularly surprising that the gap exists in this case — in August 2017, Forbes reported that Wahlberg was the highest-paid actor in Hollywood, despite having had a very bad year at the box office — the size of the gap, the fact that it was apparently negotiated without Williams’s knowledge, the disparity between the two roles, and, most importantly, the fact that they are represented by the same agency all make the story especially damning.
It’s not a good look for Wahlberg or for WME. And it’s one more data point to add to the call for wage equality in Hollywood.
