Daniels got pretty much minimum wage, $50,000, for this movie. $50,000 isn't to be sneezed at for most people, but when the other part of your comedy duo is making $7,000,000, you'd like to think that you'd get some of that as well.
Even if Daniels got half the amount Carrey got would've been fine, but yeah $50,000 is ridiculous.
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That was pretty unfair but Daniels had the last laugh, Carrey's career has gone downhill while Daniels has done quite well for himself, good for him.
It's about drawing power. Back then, Carey was a draw. They could have done the movie with a dozen different guys to do Daniels role and the movie would have been pretty much the same. It would have been totally different without Carey.
Of course, these days, Carey suffers from Chevy Chase disease.
More surprising is that Daniels would take so little money for a any movie, let alone a off the wall goofball comedy, which he hadn't really done before. He was already a well known and nicely regarded actor at that point and his rate had to be much higher than that, especially for a leading role. I can't believe his agent would even show him the script for that amount. But I guess he won in the end. The movie was a huge hit, it opened a lot of opportunities for him as a comedic actor, and the residual checks are still coming to this day.
In hindsight, getting Carrey at that point in his career for $7 million was a bargain. He was easily worth $20 million. Funny thing is before Ace Ventura came out, they offered him $350k for this, and he turned it down, hoping for $500k. New Line hesitated, and Ace Ventura came out and became a hit, and Carrey's price tag continued to rise. Then word was getting out that The Mask was going to be summer hit, and they hurried to lock him up. So moral of the story, had they just given Carrey the extra $150k that he asked for, they would have saved 6.5 million.
I hadn't realised there was that different a wage paid to both actors.
But should Carey have given some of his pay packet to Jeff? Well, though it's up to Carey what he does with his own money, there's no compulsion for him to do so. He negotiated a deal based on what he and the studio thought he was worth, so did Jeff Daniels. After Ace Ventura and The Mask were hits, Carey was in much higher demand. Less people would've gone and watched it at the cinema without him.
Do I think that Jeff Daniels deserved more? Yes. Is it a shame? Yes. But that's not Carey's fault, or Carey's responsibility to sort out.
Upon hearing this I hope he got more money than that for Gettysburg.
shareNo, but they both acted equally. They were acceptable for this sort of comedy.
shareWhat's a shame is that while this is an enjoyable movie, it's a shame my generation born in the mid 80s to early 90s remembers Jeff Daniels for this but not for his drama roles like Terms of Endearment and Gettysburg. Recently I brought up Jeff Daniels' role as George Washington up in front of some coworkers at work and one of them only knew him from this movie. In fact this person hadn't known he even was in dramas. Which is kind of odd as I don't remember any comedy he was in outside this.
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