Of his many memorable performances, Sam Rockwell is apparently still getting paid for one that never happened.
The Oscar winner recently recalled when he, Michael Imperioli and Kevin Corrigan “drove in a van to New Jersey to audition for one line in Lean on Me” early in their careers, as well as how he still gets paid despite not appearing in the 1989 film.
“And then I got it,” said Rockwell on the Happy Sad Confused podcast. “And then, they never got to my scene, so they had to let me go because they didn’t want to pay me for a week. So, they gotta pay you for a day player or pay you for a week. So, they let me go. They didn’t fire me, they just sort of let me go because they were like, ‘We can’t pay him a week for one line.’ And then Michael got it.
Rockwell added, “And I still get residual checks for that, even though I’m not in it.”
Credited in the film as ‘George’, Imperioli’s line was ultimately cut as well, but his “first experience on a movie” still made an impression after working with director John G. Avildsen on the biographical drama.
“He was very impatient,” Rockwell’s fellow White Lotus alum Imperioli told The New Yorker last year. “He was not very nice, to be honest. I think he was overwhelmed because there were, like, a thousand high-school kids in this. He made me audition in the cafeteria during the lunch break with, like, hundreds of kids. It was horrible. I had one line.”
Written by Michael Schiffer, Lean On Me stars Morgan Freeman as Joe Clark, an inner-city high school principal in Paterson, New Jersey, tasked with turning around the school’s test scores to keep it from being placed into receivership of the state government.
