7 months ago
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Tom Hollander, 56, is a veteran British actor who’s been in everything from Gosford Park to Pride & Prejudice to The Night Manager, and most recently The White Lotus. Tom Holland, 27 and also British, is Spider-Man. Hollander stars as Truman Capote in Ryan Murphy’s Feud: Capote vs. The Swans that comes out January 31 on FX, and he recently dropped by Seth Meyers’ show to plug the series. During his visit Hollander told Meyers that while briefly with the same agency as Holland, Hollander was mistakenly sent a bonus check intended for Spidey. The experience was quite sobering.
On NBC’s “Late Night with Seth Meyers” show on Monday, host Meyers said to [Tom] Hollander, “I feel like it’s almost the elephant in the room. There’s an actor named Tom Holland.”
“Oh yeah,” Hollander replied amid an uproar of audience laughter.
Meyers asked: “Do people ever make that error?”
To which, Hollander jokingly said, “Yes. It’s been very difficult. ‘Cause, you know, I was here first. But he’s enormously famous.”
While the pair do not look alike, Hollander said that “in non-visual contexts, I am mistaken for him all the time,” such as when talking to utility companies.
“‘And what’s your name?’ And they go, ‘Tom Holland?’ ‘Cause they’ve heard Tom Holland,” said Hollander, adding: “You go, ‘no it’s Tom Holland-er.’”
“Or I’m introduced to somebody’s very, very excited, then confused, then disappointed children,” he continued. “They go, ‘My children are so excited to meet you.’ And I go, ‘Are they though?’”
Hollander then illustrated what happens when he asks the parent to bring out their children, saying, “They come out and they go, ‘Where is he? Where is he?’ And they go, ‘No. N-no.’”
Hollander went on to recall what happened when he was with the same agency as the “Spider-Man” star — “briefly,” he made sure to emphasize — and the people in the accounts department “got confused.”
He said he went to see a friend who was doing theater in England for £300 ($382) a week, and Hollander sat “smugly” in the audience having just done a BBC show for around £30,000 ($38,000).
However, Hollander recounted that, when he checked his inbox during the interval, “I got an email from my 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’ve ever — it was a seven-figure sum.”
He added that Holland was “20 or something. So, my feeling of smugness, that you remember I had in the first half (of the play), disappeared very quickly. But that’s showbiz. It’s up, it’s down. It’s hero, it’s zero.”
Um… finders keepers? I love his British dry sense of humor, particularly the way he says “I don’t think I’m in The Avengers.” Oy. He’s joking now, but that had to be a bit of a soul-crushing moment. He (Hollander) has spent decades working steadily across theater, film, TV, and then this kid’s first bonus check is more money than he’s probably ever made combined. It’s a real “I laugh because I dare not cry” moment. Hollander, for his part, looks and sounds fabulous as Truman Capote. I say sounds because with someone like Capote nailing the voice really matters. But going off of the trailer there’s not a whiff of an English accent. I hope this role brings Hollander some good attention. It’s not likely to be a seven-figure check, but it’d be nice if people solidly knew his name for his own work.
Photos credit: Janet Mayer/INSTARimages.com, Jennifer Bloc/Future Image/Cover Images, Justin Ng / Avalon, Getty Images
