Henry Cavill's Recent DC Cameos Paid Him $20k per Second of His Screen Time
While Henry Cavill can now include “former Superman” in his CV, he went out if not with a bang then with a pretty solid paycheck for what was essentially just a few seconds of work.
As we all know by now, after James Gunn and Peter Safran took over DC Studios, they started shaking things up quite a lot, stripping the two lead actors of their roles in the previous DCEU. Ben Affleck had to step down as Batman, and Henry Cavill had to hang up his Superman suit…so it could be taken by his younger lookalike.
For Cavill, the past years were not the best when it came to his work for DC: James Gunn himself claimed that the “previous regime” was “d*cking Henry around.”
The mysterious internal conflict was so intense that the actor was not even getting to film proper cameos in the most recent DCEU movies: they were all just laughable.
But for what is regarded as an insult — a few seconds of footage from a distance without even showing his face — Henry Cavill was still handsomely compensated for these cameos. Sure, he was making twice as much per episode of The Witcher S2 as he made for both his cameos in Black Adam and The Flash, but it’s not about the total haul.
The thing is, in both movies, Cavill had around 12-13 seconds of screen time — and each movie paid him $250k for his appearance, according to film journalist Umberto Gonzalez. While this only adds up to $500k for both cameos, it’s the pay rate that counts: essentially, the actor was getting paid around $20k for one second (!) of his screen time!
Well, this is quite an extraordinary pay rate, indeed. To put things into perspective, if an actor was paid this much for a full movie — which is, let’s say, exactly two hours — they would receive $144M in just their base salary.
So yeah, it’s safe to say that despite all the internal drama, Henry Cavill was still compensated more than enough.