Legendary Nigerian actor, Pete Edochie, has revealed the amount (in naira) he was paid for his first movie role decades ago.
Speaking in an interview with media personality, Chide Jideonwo, Edochie said he was offered N50,000 (Fifty Thousand Naira) to make a movie.
He said someone came to his house with a cheque when he had just lost his broadcast job and the paycheck encouraged him to abandon broadcasting for acting.
“I was sitting there with her in the parlour when somebody from Lagos came to give me a check for fifty thousand to make a film,” he said.
According to the Nollywood veteran, the acting gig and paycheck came at the right time, as he had just lost his broadcasting job due to religious differences and internal issues.
Edochie said he talked to his wife after losing his job and she encouraged him to embrace acting as a new career path since his job a director had ended.
Recalling the conversation with his wife, the actor shared; “I told my wife my work was over. She hugged me, bought me a bottle of beer, and said, ‘Pete, you’ve always wanted to be an actor; the time has come.’ At that time, my salary as the director was N9000 per month.”
However, before he formally moved on from broadcasting, Pete Edochie the role of Okonkwo, the lead character in a Nigerian Television Authority (NTA) adaptation of Chinua Achebe’s best-selling novel Things Fall Apart.
He won an international award for his execution of the role and the BBC had to fly into Nigeria to have a special feature with him as a result of the movie project.
Watch the full interview: