Sam Rockwell: I Still Get Paid for 1989 Film I Was Never In

Easy work, if you can get it. Sam Rockwell, who garnered quite a bit of attention for his role as a sex addict in the last season of White Lotus, once had a much smaller role in a rather big movie—and he still gets paid for it, even though the part never actually materialized. The 56-year-old Oscar winner revealed earlier this month on the Happy Sad Confused podcast that he continues to receive residual checks for 1989's Lean On Me, a film that had bit parts up for grabs when he piled into a van with fellow newbie actors Michael Imperioli and Kevin Corrigan so they could drive to New Jersey to audition, per Deadline.

"And I got it," Rockwell recalled on the podcast of nabbing one line in the film. "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." Instead, he said, he was paid a day rate and sent on his way—not exactly fired, but more "they just sort of let me go." He said that after he was dismissed, Imperioli eventually got a line in the movie instead, which was, per Entertainment Weekly: "Hey, I'm gonna be a star."

Imperioli, who has said that his experience with Lean On Me made him feel like a "horrible" actor, eventually saw his single line in the film nixed as well. Rockwell said on the podcast that he and Imperioli later swapped another role between them, a part in Woody Allen's 1998 movie Celebrity. In that instance, Rockwell took over Imperioli's role as a member of Leonardo DiCaprio's entourage in the film after Imperioli had to drop out "to do a little pilot called [the] Sopranos, that I heard didn't go anywhere," Rockwell joked.