Freddie Prinze Jr was 'so angry' at being asked to take a pay cut for Scooby Doo 2 so his co-stars could get a raise
Topics: Film and TV, Celebrity
Ali Condon
Featured Image Credit: Newscom / Alamy Stock Photo / Warner Bros
Topics: Film and TV, Celebrity
Freddie Prinze Jr has revealed that he was asked to take a pay cut for Scooby-Doo 2 so that his co-stars could be given a raise.
The actor, who played Fred in the live action, confessed that he had a whole host of frustrations with the Scooby-Doo franchise - despite its immense success.
Freddie, 46, claims that a financial issue that cropped up before they filmed the sequel made him 'so angry'.
Speaking to Esquire, Freddie claimed that before he and his cast mates Sarah Michelle Gellar, Matthew Lillard and Linda Cardellini signed on to film Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed, he was asked to take a pay cut so the team could give the rest of the cast a pay rise.
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"I remember thinking, 'Hold up, who's giving them the raise? Me or y'all?'" he said in the interview.
"Like, we made you guys three-quarters of a billion dollars, you can't afford to pay them what I'm making on this? Screw that."
Freddie went on to allege that, in an effort to convince him to take the pay cut, the studio supposedly released his salary in a magazine.
"My ego was so angry," he remembered.
It was after that incident that he decided he was pretty much done with the Scooby-Doo franchise.
UNILAD has approached Warner Bros for comment.
Freddie also claimed that the film he had originally signed on for wasn't the film that ended up being made.
Although the actor didn't really elaborate on this, the film's writer James Gunn shared similar sentiments when he revealed that he originally had plans to make the character Velma 'explicitly gay' before Warner Bros toned it down.
"In 2001 Velma was explicitly gay in my initial script", he told fans in a Twitter Q&A back in 2020.
"But the studio just kept watering it down & watering it down, becoming ambiguous (the version shot), then nothing (the released version) & finally having a boyfriend (the sequel)."
All that being said, a newfound love of the Scooby-Doo live actions films has exploded on social media in recent years - so much so that Freddie has finally fallen back in love with the film.
"All these people that had grown up loving those movies started reaching out…and then I got what I felt was a more accurate perspective on what that movie meant to people because I was no longer viewing it through the lenses of the studio."