Tom Hollander accidentally received Tom Holland's 'astonishing' bonus for Avengers movie

Tom Hollander has told the tale of the time he once accidentally got one of Tom Holland's pay-cheques because their names are so similar.

It's a thing among actors that they're not really allowed to have the same name as another one, but there's nothing to stop two people from having very similar names.

Having starred in Pride and Prejudice, Pirates of the Caribbean (he's the guy from that GIF where someone walks down the stairs while the ship explodes around him) and In The Loop, Hollander is no stranger to being on the big screen.

Fans of The White Lotus will also know him well, and Hollander recently appeared on Late Night with Seth Meyers to promote his upcoming series Feud where he plays Truman Capote.

Knowing all of this, you'd never confuse him for Holland, but the actor revealed that there are times when people get them mixed up.

NBC

During the interview with Meyers, the conversation turned to times he'd been mistaken for Tom Holland, and Hollander told the story of how he accidentally got one of the Spider-Man star's cheques.

He joked: "It's been very difficult, because you know I was here first but he's enormously famous.

"I don't actually get mistaken for him, but in nonvisual contexts I get mistaken for him all the time."

Hollander also said he was occasionally introduced to people's 'excited, then confused, then disappointed children' who might have thought they were meeting Spider-Man.

Then, of course, there was the time he got Holland's paycheques after someone mixed their names up.

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"People in the accounts department of my agency got confused. We were with the same agency, briefly," Hollander said of how the wires became crossed and money was misplaced, with particular emphasis on the last word.

"It was a terrible moment, I went to see my friend who was doing theatre in England for £300 a week and doing great work.

"I sat smugly in the audience having just done a BBC show for 30 grand or something which was gonna get me through the next year or so, I was thinking 'well this is marvellous, I'm very prosperous'."

Hollander said that he was checking his emails during the play's interval and spotted a message telling him he was getting a 'box office bonus for The Avengers', which perplexed him a bit since he hadn't been in those movies.

He said: "It was an astonishing amount of money, it was not his salary, it was his first box office bonus. Not the whole box office, the first one.

"It was more money than I've ever, it was a seven figure sum. He was 20, so my feeling of smugness disappeared very quickly."