Most of us are familiar with the high pay that many actors receive. Sometimes, it can border on the obscene because it is so high.
That isn’t the case for the late N!xau Toma, who started a movie that made almost $90 million. As the star of that movie, you would think that he made a lot of money but in reality, he was only paid $300.
N!xau Toma played his part in the movie, The Gods Must Be Crazy. It was not the most popular movie of all time, but that 1980 comedy had quite a following.
The movie itself is about a tribe in South Africa that found a glass Coca-Cola bottle. The bottle had fallen out of a plane, and the natives in the area thought that it was a gift from their gods.
It seems like a relatively simple story, but when everybody wants to get their hands on the Coke bottle, absolute chaos breaks out in the village. The tribe leader, Xi, played by Toma attempts to restore peace by returning the bottle but he ends up going to the ‘ends of the world’ on his humorous journey.
As he is traveling, he runs across a village schoolteacher (Sandra Prinsloo), some guerrilla terrorists, and biologists, played by Marius Weyers. Things get crazy very quickly.
Toma played a huge role in the movie but he was only paid $300 for his efforts. Jamie Uys, the director of the film said that he paid Toma $300 for the first 10 days he worked. He said that the actor didn’t understand how much the money was worth.
After Toma simply let the money blow away ‘literally’, he was given 12 heads of cattle. He then received $100 monthly since the filming stopped and the trust account was set up a disdain for $20,000.
Toma was born in India, and he is one of the indigenous hunter gatherers, known as bushman. He spoke Jul’hoan, Otjiherero, Tswana, and had never interacted with people outside of his local community before the filming of The Gods Must Be Crazy.
He was flown back and forth to the remote area of Tsumkwe in the Namibian part of the Kalahari to lower culture shock. The Filming took place. in Gambia and Botswana.
Unfortunately, Toma passed away in 2003 when he was in his late 50s.