Tom Holland’s Avengers bonus accidentally sent to Tom Hollander.
Written by Zenna Issa on January 26, 2024
It is not every day a million dollars shows up in your account by accident.
The White Lotus actor Tom Hollander accidentally received a paycheck meant for Tom Holland, the Spiderman actor.
Speaking to Late Night host Seth Meyers, Hollander said: “We were with the same agents briefly and people in the accounts department got confused.
“It’s been very difficult, because you know I was here first but he’s enormously famous,” he added jokingly.
Explaining how he discovered the accidental payment, Hollander said he was watching a friend in the theatre who was being paid £300.
“I sat smugly in the audience having just done a BBC show for £30,000 or something which was going to get me through the next year or so, and I was thinking, ‘Well, this is marvellous, I’m very prosperous.'”
At the interval, he checked his emails and saw one containing a payslip labelled as “Box office bonus for The Avengers”.
“It was an astonishing amount of money,” the 56-year-old told Meyers. “It was not his salary. It was his first box office bonus. Not the whole box office bonus, the first one. And it was more money than I’d ever [seen]. It was a seven-figure sum.”
“My feeling of smugness disappeared,” he added.
Holland, who is dating Euphoria star Zendaya, has played Spiderman in six Marvel Cinematic Universe films.
Hollander said: “I obviously don’t actually get mistaken for him, but in non-visual contexts, I’m mistaken for him all the time.
“Talking to utility companies… or when I’m introduced to somebody’s very excited, then confused, then disappointed children.”
While similar names can confuse, even more mix-ups have occurred when two celebrities have the same name.
In November 2022, physicist Brian Cox and actor Brian Cox told the BBC how their identical names have caused confusion.
The pair said they often arrive somewhere to find that people were expecting “the other” Brian Cox.
Physicist Cox even said he had to use a different name when a hotel told him that their system couldn’t handle two separate bookings under the same name.