In a new interview with the Guardian, Sean Astin says that in the early 2000s, during the fame of The Lord of the Rings, he was forced to sell his house because he negotiated too little pay to play Samwise Gamgee in Peter Jackson’s groundbreaking film trilogy. The revelation may come as a shock to fans considering the movie “Rings” was a cultural phenomenon that grossed $2.9 billion worldwide between 2001 and 2003.
“I wasn’t ready for that level of visibility and access,” Astin told the publication. “And there was a disconnect between the attention I was getting and the money we had. It wasn’t much money! In fact, I had to sell my house because it was so small in the negotiations for the trilogy.”
Astin said he is “very comfortable financially now,” but that wasn’t the case when “The Lord of the Rings” was dominating the box office charts. Peter Jackson and the team behind the “Ring” trilogy famously shot three films at once, which meant the cast didn’t have the opportunity to renegotiate their salaries based on the success of each film.
“We weren’t making one movie and then renegotiating the contract for the next one, so it wasn’t a lucrative scenario where you could feel secure for the rest of your life,” Astin’s Ring co-star Elijah Wood told Business Insider last year. Director Wood noted that New Line Cinema took a “real gamble” by shooting three movies at the same time. To reduce financial risk, the ensemble cast “was not paid a large salary,” the Frodo actor said.
“The benefit of that was that we were also signing up for something that will be a part of our lives forever,” Wood added at the time.
Astin previously revealed that he makes “about $75,000 per movie,” bringing his total pay for “Ring” to about $250,000. Co-star Orlando Bloom (who played Legolas) said in a 2019 interview on “The Howard Stern Show” that he was paid just $175,000 for the trilogy.
The “Lord of the Rings” franchise is currently in development for a big-screen return, courtesy of “The Hunt for Gollum,” directed by Andy Serkis and a new movie co-written by Stephen Colbert. It has not yet been decided whether Astin will return to either project, but he told the Guardian that if he did, he would certainly fight for a better paycheck.
