Do you know how many Emilia Clarke who plays 'Khaleesi' in Game of Thrones was paid to speak only three word in season 7's 1st episode.
In a report released in May this year, The Daily Express revealed the fat paychecks that will be taken home by the five lead actors of Game of Thrones. The report mentioned a whopping £2 million each for Emilia Clarke, Kit Harington, Lena Headey, Peter Dinklage and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, per episode, for the final two seasons of the show.
The humongous amount sent ripples through the industry and several comparisons were made with other television actors, Hollywood actors and even some from Bollywood.
Now, with the first episode out, we couldn’t help but notice how Emilia, or Daenerys Targaryen, spoke just three words in it. This got us thinking how much, if only spoken words were a measure of performance, each of those words would amount to if the total pay was divided by the number of words the actors spoke in the episode.
Of course, this is simply an exercise in numbers and in no way suggests that an actor’s worth is measured merely in the words he/she speaks. A lot more makes or breaks a performance and this is not an attempt at belittling any of that.
Of the five lead actors, Jon Snow (Kit Harrington) spoke the most words by quite a stretch. His address to his men, the little squabble with Sansa and reading out Cersei’s threatening message amounted to a total of 560 words.
Converting pounds to dollars, Kit took home $2.6 million for the first episode, which means, each of his word was for $4,642.
Second to Jon was Cersei Lannister (Lena Headey) with 396 words spoken. In the first episode, she explains her intentions to Jaime, reasons inviting the Greyjoys to King’s Landing and commands Euron to impress her with a gift.
With 396 words, she took home $6,565 for each one of those. When checking the trend in her words closely, we could notice how little she speaks when Euron came to her court. However, what little she did speak, it was all to-the-point and impactful.
Lagging close behind is Cersei’s brother/lover, Jaime Lannister (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau). Nikolaj spoke 340 words, which made each of his words worth $7,647.
Following Jaime is Queen of Dragons, Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke). She spoke merely three words but of course, those were the three very important words that closed the episode.
Her “Shall we begin?” got her $866,666 per word. A bit less if you count the question mark as well!
The last on this list is Tyrion Lannister (Peter Dinklage).
Everyone’s favourite character in Westeros was given no lines in the episode. And because there is no way to divide anything by zero (actually there is but that’s a lot of complicated maths that we don’t want to get into), we don’t really know how much he took home ‘per word’. Let’s just says it’s about $2.6 million.
If this still doesn’t seem like a big deal, $2.6 million amounts to Rs 16.7 crore.On comparison, Kapil Sharma makes between Rs 60-80 lakh per episode for his The Kapil Sharma Show, while Salman Khan reportedly bagged around Rs 8 crore per episode for Bigg Boss’ season 10.
In Hollywood, Charlie Sheen is the only one who came close to the GOT 5. He took home $1.8 million per episode (Rs 11 crore), according to Uproxx, for Two and a Half Men.
However, either of the five may still not make it to the television’s highest paid list as they will get the amount for only seven episodes, compared to Johnny Galecki, Jim Parsons, Kaley Cuoco of The Big Bang Theory who take $1 million per episode (Rs 6.3 crore) but an entire season of the show consists of about 24 episodes.
Stay tuned for our review of Game of Thrones season 7 second episode on Monday.
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