Here’s the beauty of residuals. Even though Sam Rockwell was not in Lean On Me, he still makes money from it because he was hired for one day of work. Rockwell shared the story in a recent episode of the Happy Sad Confused podcast, recalling the contemporaries he used to go up against back in his auditioning days. He shared that he, Kevin Corrigan, and Michael Imperioli “drove in a van to New Jersey” together “to audition for one line in Lean On Me. And I got it, 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.”
“They just sort of let me go” rather than outright fire him, Rockwell explained, saying the production decided they’d rather pay him a day player rate than have him around a whole week for one line. “And then they hired Michael, and Michael got it, Michael’s in the movie. But I still get residual checks for that, even though I’m not in it.” Ironic that despite the movie’s cost-cutting measure, he’s been getting money out of the production for three decades!
Getting cut may have been for the best, as Imperioli told The New Yorker last year that Lean On Me—his first-ever experience on a movie—was a stressful experience. Director John Avildsen “was not very nice,” Imperioli said. “He made me audition in the cafeteria during the lunch break with, like, hundreds of kids. It was horrible. I had one line.” Uncertain of himself on his first movie set, Imperioli claimed he mumbled his line, to which Avildsen admonished that “‘you’d better give me something or you’re out of here!'” the actor recalled. “I was horrified. I think, I’m horrible, I suck.”
Among those Rockwell used to see in the audition room were Billy Crudup, Liev Schreiber, Jeffrey Wright, Mark Ruffalo, and more recognizable names. But he and fellow White Lotus alum Imperioli seem to have circled each other for a while. Rockwell said that when he was later cast in Woody Allen’s Celebrity, he was told “Woody wants you to dye your hair bleach blonde,” an idea he tried to fight. But then he was told “‘Michael Imperioli was gonna do it,’ because he had dropped out,” Rockwell shared. “And I was replacing Michael. Because Michael was gonna do a little pilot called Sopranos, I heard didn’t go anywhere. And so I said, ‘Alright, I’ll dye my hair.”
