Renowned Nollywood actor Lateef Adedimeji has opened up about the financial struggles he faced early in his acting career, despite playing lead roles in movies.
Adedimeji shared his experience during a recent episode of the ‘Deep Dive’ podcast, hosted by comedian Teju Babyface.
The ‘Jagun Jagun’ star revealed that in 2014, he was paid as little as N4,000 for lead roles, an amount far below what many would expect for such a position in the industry.
He recounted how the initial years of his career were marked by extremely low pay, with the highest amount he received for a lead role being only N10,000. This period of underpayment persisted until 2015 when his earnings for a role finally increased to between N100,000 and N200,000.
“If I tell people that I wasn’t collecting N100,000, N200,000 until 2015/16, a lot of people would not believe me,” Adedimeji explained. “Before then, the highest I collected for a lead role was either N4,000, N5,000, or N10,000. I was paid that low back in 2014 because it was more like a learning process.”
