Rebel Wilson details how Hollywood’s pay scales can increase exponentially in her new memoir, Rebel Rising. The actress and comedian opens up about her salaries for Bridesmaids and the Pitch Perfect trilogy.
Wilson writes in the book that she was paid only $3,500 for 2011’s Bridesmaids, which starred Kristen Wiig, Maya Rudolph, Rose Byrne and Melissa McCarthy (Wilson played Brynn, the obnoxious roommate of Wiig’s Annie Walker). But, the entirety of her small check went to Screen Actors Guild fees to join the union. Nevertheless, “that didn’t matter to me,” Wilson writes. “The experience was everything!”
Wilson notes she booked six new gigs within two weeks of Bridesmaids‘ release, one of which was the 2012 a cappella smash hit, Pitch Perfect.
“Boy, did that movie pay dividends!” Wilson writes, noting she was paid “SAG minimum scale, which was $65,000,” for the film. Pitch Perfect’s success spawned two sequels, in 2015 and 2017, and Wilson writes she was ultimately paid $10 million for Pitch Perfect 3.
Though she acknowledges the jump was a “pretty big pay raise,” the actress is clear that she had to fight for it.
“At the very end of filming Pitch 2, the producers told the older girls, like me, Anna Camp, Anna Kendrick and Brittany Snow, that we would not feature in the third movie,” Wilson writes. “They were going to replace us all with younger actresses, led by Hailee Steinfeld, whose character was introduced in Pitch 2.”
Wilson recalls the suggested replacement felt like a “nasty and unnecessary thing to say to us hardworking gals,” and even remembers having to film a scene in which she and her fellow veteran characters handed over the reins to Steinfeld.
“I love Hailee, don’t get me wrong, she’s a stellar performer, but she had only joined us in the second film as the newbie and wasn’t part of the original DNA of the franchise,” Wilson writes, noting that as a trained lawyer, she was able to go to bat for her team using focus group intel that her character was an audience favorite.
“I believe I was subsequently the highest-paid person on Pitch 3,” she writes in her memoir.
Representatives for Universal did not immediately reply to requests for comment.