This week, during a taping of Late Night with Seth Meyers, the actor Tom Hollander casually unveiled what might be the greatest talkshow anecdote ever told. After a few minutes of halting, self-conscious promotion for his new Truman Capote show, during which he barely made eye contact with anyone, he opened up.
Asked if he was sick of people confusing him for Tom Holland, he started unloading a story about a time he felt particularly flush, visiting a friend in a theatre and deliberately not trying to lord his television earnings over him, when he mistakenly received an email from his agent. Labelled “box office bonus for The Avengers”, the email’s intended target was Tom Holland. Hollander opened it. “It was an astonishing amount of money,” he told Meyers. “It was not his salary. It was his first box office bonus. Not the whole box office bonus. The first one. And it was more money than I’d ever seen. It was a seven-figure sum.”
