Freddie Prinze Jr was left feeling “so angry” when he was asked to take a pay cut for Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed in order for his costars to receive a raise.
Prinze Jr starred as Fred in the two early-Noughties Scooby-Doo live-action adaptations alongside his wife Sarah Michelle Gellar (Daphne), Linda Cardellini (Velma), and Matthew Lillard (Shaggy).
In a recent interview with Esquire, Prinze Jr explained why he was so upset over being asked to reduce his salary in the sequel.
“I remember thinking, ‘Hold up, who’s giving them the raise? Me or y’all?’ Like we made you guys three-quarters of a billion dollars, you can’t afford to pay them what I’m making on this? Screw that,” he said.
Prinze Jr also alleged that Warner Bros, the studio behind the film, disclosed his salary to a magazine in an effort to get him to comply. The Independent has contacted Warner Bros for comment.
“My ego was so angry,” he recalled, adding that he knew then that he was done with the franchise.
Nevertheless, the actor now feels proud of the legacy of the two films.
“All these people that had grown up loving those [Scooby-Doo] movies started reaching out…and then I got what I felt was a more accurate perspective on what that movie meant to people because I was no longer viewing it through the lenses of the studio,” he said.
Last month, the release of the latest iteration of the Scooby-Doo universe, Trick or Treat Scooby-Doo!, canonically confirmed that Velma was attracted to women – something that had long been suggested, but has never been addressed directly as part of her story.
In response, Cardellini said she thought it was “great” for Velma’s sexuality to finally be acknowledged in a major way.
James Gunn, who wrote the live-action films, shared in 2020 that he’d made attempts to make Velma a visible lesbian in those films, “but the studio just kept watering it down & watering it down, becoming ambiguous (the version shot), then nothing (the released version) and finally having a boyfriend (the sequel)”.
As well as this version of Velma, the famously bespectacled character will have her own HBO Max spin-off series in 2023 – this time, depicted as South Asian and voiced by Mindy Kaling.
