Tom Hollander Once Received Tom Holland's 'Avengers' Payslip

Tom Hollander and Tom Holland — (Image credit: Getty Images)

You may have noticed that White Lotus star Tom Hollander shares basically the exact same name as Spider-Man star Tom Holland. They're also both British and white, but the comparison does kind of end there, considering the former is 56 and known for his dramatic work, and the latter is 27 and known for his—ahem—superhero work.

Still, this similarity has caused some issues for poor Hollander in the past, considering he admitted during a recent appearance on Late Night With Seth Meyers that he was once sent one of Holland's Avengers payslips by mistake. "It's been very difficult," the actor said of the ongoing confusion between them.

"People in the accounts department of my agency got confused—and we were with the same agency," he explained, adding pointedly, "Briefly."

Hollander recalled, "I went to see my friend who was doing theater in England, for £300 a week, you know, but doing great work, Chekhov, and I sat smugly in the audience having just done a BBC show for 30 grand or something, which was, you know, going to get me through the next year or so. And I was thinking, 'Well this is marvelous. I'm very prosperous, but my good friend Peter is doing this great play and I'm going to go afterwards and see him and slightly patronize him and say how wonderful it was.'"

He continued, "And then the interval came, and I thought I'd check my emails, and I got an email from the 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.'"

Worse than that, the payslip was for an amount of money Hollander hadn't even imagined one could earn for acting.

"It was an astonishing amount of money," he said. "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 was 20 or something. So my feeling of smugness that you remember I had in the first half disappeared very quickly. But that's show biz! It's up, it's down, it's hero, it's zero."

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Iris Goldsztajn is a London-based journalist, editor and author. She is the morning editor at Marie Claire, and her work has appeared in the likes of British Vogue, InStyle, Cosmopolitan, Refinery29 and SELF. Iris writes about everything from celebrity news and relationship advice to the pitfalls of diet culture and the joys of exercise. She has many opinions on Harry Styles, and can typically be found eating her body weight in cheap chocolate.