Keanu Reeves, Queen Latifah, Samuel L. Jackson — And 9 Other Celebs Who Have Very Specific Contract Demands
By Carley Suthers,
2024-08-26
Lavish demands and riders from celebrities are nothing new in Hollywood — so much so that they are sometimes included in their contracts. Whether they reveal their preferences in an interview or tabloids pick it up for the public's amusement, we are always learning something new (good or bad) about our favorite celebs...
Photographer, Basak Gurbuz Derma / Getty Images
From live animals on set to "no-death" clauses, it's time to take a look at some of the strangest celebrity contract demands:
During a 2023 interview with Wired, the 59-year-old confirmed the existence of a clause in all of his film contracts that forbids studios from digitally manipulating his performances.
Reeves stated, “Yeah, digitally. I don’t mind if someone takes a blink out during an edit. But early on, in the early 2000s, or it might have been the ’90s, I had a performance changed. They added a tear to my face, and I was just like, ‘Huh?!’ It was like, I don’t even have to be here.”
“What’s frustrating about that is you lose your agency,” he continued, “When you give a performance in a film, you know you’re going to be edited, but you’re participating in that. If you go into deepfake land, it has none of your points of view. That’s scary."
During a 2019 appearance on The Graham Norton Show , Witherspoon admitted that she took home all of her character, Elle Woods' outfits from Legally Blonde 2: Red, White, and Blonde , the sequel to the blockbuster 2001 original.
“I got all of my wardrobe,” she said. "I had it written in my contract.” The 48-year-old revealed one collection she brought home was 77 pairs of Jimmy Choo heels but claimed she hadn't worn all of them except during filming.
However, she stated, “On the 15th anniversary, I took them all out of storage and tried them all on. Some of them fit, some of them didn’t. It was really cool. I showed them all to my daughter.”
In a March 2021 interview on SiriusXM, Graham revealed that she has a clause built into her contracts that should another Gilmore Girls sequel or spinoff occur during the filming of another project, she'll be available to reprise her role as Lorelai.
She stated, “I put that window into all my new jobs just in case. And it’s not — I don’t want to start any new rumors — it’s not for any concrete reason.”
The 57-year-old revealed her bond with Gilmore Girls creator Amy Sherman-Palladino led to the clause. “I have a loyalty and an openness to working with her, first of all. And because we could never have predicted [a revival] in the past,” she continued. "So that door is open. Is it creatively warranted? Is it, you know, something? I don’t know. I don’t know. But yes, technically yes.”
Frazer Harrison / Getty Images
4. Danny Trejo:
In two 2017 posts on his official X and FaceBook accounts, Trejo confirmed the theory that he insists that all of the evil film characters he plays die. In all of his movie contracts, the Machete star specifically requests that any villainous characters he plays be killed off by the movie's conclusion. He wrote that he wants "kids to learn that crime doesn't pay."
Alberto E. Rodriguez / Getty Images
5. Garry Marshall and Hector Elizondo:
After a chance meeting (aka Elizondo accidentally hitting Marshall in the face with a basketball) in 1979, Marshall pitched his film Young Doctors in Love to the then 43-year-old Elizondo, and the rest was history.
After the film was released in 1982, Elizondo appeared in every Marshall-directed film from that time on. In a 2016 Entertainment Tonight interview , Elizondo revealed, "I couldn't say no of course, because I found out years later I was in his contract." The Pretty Woman actor explained that Marshall had a clause in his film contracts that always allowed him to cast his friend.
Mat Hayward / Getty Images
6. Queen Latifah:
In 2022, Latifah opened up to Entertainment Tonight about her "no-death clause," acknowledging that her decision not to die on film was influenced by the frequent killing of her movie characters early in her career. Within a span of three years, her characters in Set It Off , Sphere, and The Bone Collector did receive brutal endings.
"I noticed I was too good at it, so it's kind of a running joke," the 54-year-old revealed, "I was like, 'I don't get to do any sequels if I keep being this good at [dying].' So I said, 'Look, you gotta put a no death clause in these contracts so they can't just kill me off like this. I'm never gonna get a sequel in!"
Gilbert Flores / Variety via Getty Images
7. Nicolas Cage:
In the DVD commentary for the 1988 film Vampire's Kiss , Cage revealed that in the scene where his character Peter gets bitten by a bat, he wanted a real bat on set instead of the mechanical bat that had been brought in from England. "I kind of went off my rocker," he said.
Producer Barbara Zitwer confirmed, stating , "Shooting the bat drove him crazy. He didn’t understand why we couldn’t get a real bat. I tried to explain to him, they have rabies. You can’t control them. I did everything. I called the head bat specialist at the bat zoo. I was prepared to take him over there, bring the guy to the set."
“There was a young production assistant who was assigned just to Nicolas. His name was Osman. He sent Osman to Central Park with an ice cooler and a broom to try and capture a bat. And then Osman told us that Nicolas found out you could get bats from Mexico. Probably illegally, of course. We just said, ‘OK, this is going too far. We’re not gonna FedEx some bat from Mexico.’ Except I think they actually looked into it. That was one time that I recall being extremely contentious.”
Director Robert Bierman finally persuaded Cage to stop pursuing a live bat by explaining that a wild bat bite would probably kill him and, therefore, ruin the film.
Amy Sussman / The Hollywood Reporter via Getty Images
8. William Frawley:
William Frawley, who played Fred on I Love Lucy , really loved the New York Yankees. A devoted fan, through and through, he had it written into his I Love Lucy contract that he did not have to work if the Yankees were playing in the World Series. This agreement worked well for him, considering the Bronx Bombers were in eight of the ten World Series during the decade. Since production honored Frawley's clause, his character does not appear in two episodes of the classic sitcom.
Michael Ochs Archives / Getty Images
9. Samuel L. Jackson:
In a 2017 interview with the New York Times, Jackson admitted , “I can be a hard taskmaster for some directors.” The acclaimed actor is practically in charge on film sets. He famously refuses to do extra takes if he believes a scene is already perfect, but that isn't his only demand.
The Pulp Fiction star has also revealed that his contracts include a clause allowing him to golf twice weekly during filming. Telling CNN in 2013, "They have to let me play at least twice a week. Generally they either move me onto a golf course or I join a club so I can play there. I like golf because it's a perfect game for an only child like me — you get responsibility for everything you do bad, and you get all the credit for everything you do well."
Emma Mcintyre / Getty Images for TCM
10. Daniel Day-Lewis:
If there's anything Daniel Day-Lewis is known for, it's method acting. From living in the woods to catching pneumonia, there's no length the Oscar-winner won't go to for his craft, and the 2012 film Lincoln wasn't an exception.
Not only did Day-Lewis drop his British accent while filming the Spielberg-directed drama, but all other British cast members were required to do the same. In an interview with the New York Times, costar Jared Harris, who played Ulysses S. Grant in the film, recalled that he was asked to hide his own British accent so as not to throw Day-Lewis off.
Later, Lukas Haas, who played a soldier in the movie, revealed, "You could only address him as Mr. President. Even Spielberg had to."
Dimitrios Kambouris / Getty Images
11. Bea Arthur:
According to Jim Colucci's book Golden Girls Forever , Arthur wasn't fond of wearing shoes on the set of the iconic sitcom. He wrote that, alongside a rumored hatred of chewing gum and birds, “She also never wanted to wear shoes. She had it written into her contract that she was allowed to not wear shoes as long as she agreed not to sue the producers if she hurt herself.”
Abc Photo Archives / Disney General Entertainment Content via Getty Images
12. Van Halen:
By this point, almost everyone has heard about Van Halen's famed hatred of brown M&Ms (which, to be fair, are the laziest color of M&Ms). The demand for a bowl of M&Ms first appeared in their contract rider in the 1980s, with the rule, “absolutely no brown ones.”
The media immediately latched onto this tale of rock n' roll excess, with the Racine Journal Times reporting in May 1980, “In catering to the taste of his stars, the stage manager of Landmark Productions had to pluck all the brown ones out of six bags of the little goodies [M&M's]. He can now attest that a typical bag contains more brown than any other color.”
David Tan/Shinko Music / Getty Images
However, former frontman David Lee Roth set the record straight in his 1997 autobiography, Crazy From the Heat, writing,
"So just as a little test, in the technical aspect of the rider, it would say, 'Article 148: There will be 15 amperage voltage sockets at 20-foot spaces, evenly, providing 19 amperes … ' This kind of thing. And article number 126, in the middle of nowhere, was, 'There will be no brown M&M’s in the backstage area, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation.'
So, when I would walk backstage, if I saw a brown M&M in that bowl … well, line-check the entire production. Guaranteed you’re going to arrive at a technical error. They didn’t read the contract. Guaranteed you’d run into a problem. Sometimes it would threaten to just destroy the whole show. Something like, literally, life-threatening."
Which one of these contract clauses did you find most bizarre? Do you know of any other wild celeb demands? Let us know in the comments!
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