British actor Tom Hollander has revealed he’s often mistaken for Spider-Man star Tom Holland – and once received the younger actor’s first box office bonus payslip for The Avengers, which was an eye-popping seven-figure sum.
He said their agency once mixed up him and fellow English actor Holland via email.
Asked if he was ever mistaken for Holland by Late Night host Seth Meyers, the 56-year-old White Lotus star joked: “Yes. It’s been very difficult, ’cause, you know, I was here first, but he’s enormously famous.”
He went on: “Obviously, I don’t actually get mistaken for him, but in non-visual contexts, I am mistaken for him all the time.
“So, like, talking to utility companies, they just, ‘And what’s your name?’, and they go ‘Tom Holland?’, ’cause they’ve heard Tom Holland, you go, ‘No, it’s Tom Hollan-der’.
“Or, I’m introduced to somebody’s very, very excited – then confused, then disappointed children, who they go, ‘My children are so excited to meet you’, and I go, ‘Are they though?… Okay, I don’t think they are but bring them out’.
“And they come out and they go, ‘Where is he? Where is he?'”
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He then told of the time he and Holland shared the same agency, and how he received the mistaken bonus payslip while watching a friend in a play who was earning £300 a week.
“People in the accounts department of my agency got confused, and we were with the same agency, briefly. And it was a terrible moment,” he said.
“I went to see my friend who was doing theatre in England and for £300 a week, but doing great work, Chekhov, and I sat smugly in the audience having just done a BBC show for 30 grand or something, which was, you know, going to get me through the next year or so, and I was thinking, ‘Well this is marvellous. I’m very prosperous’.
“But my good friend Peter is doing this great play and I’m going to go afterwards and see him and slightly patronise him and say how wonderful it was, and then the interval came and I thought I’d check my emails.
‘An astonishing amount of money’
“I got an email from the agency saying, ‘Payment advice slip – your first box office bonus for The Avengers’, and I thought, I don’t think I’m in The Avengers.
“And it was an astonishing amount of money. And it was not his salary. It was his first box office bonus, not the whole box office, the first one, and it was more money than I’d ever, it was a seven-figure sum. He was 20 or something.
“So my feelings of smugness, that you remember I had in the first half, disappeared very quickly.”
“But that’s showbiz,” he added.
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Hollander was promoting the second season of FX’s acclaimed series Feud, called Capote Vs The Swans, in which he plays Truman Capote.
He has also starred in Pirates Of The Caribbean in which he played Lord Cutler Beckett and the 2005 version of Pride And Prejudice in which he had the role of Mr Collins on film, and in The Night Manager and Rev on TV, for which he won BAFTAs.
