Steven Spielberg’s 1975 seminal thriller Jaws continues to fascinate cinephiles across the world. But one individual who seems to have reaped the most impressive return-on-investment earnings from his association with that movie is Jeffrey Voorhees. Now 62 years old, he played Alex Kintner, the local Amity boy who gets killed by the shark, when he was just 12. However, he still benefits from the royalties and other perks of that cameo to the extent that he’s retired from his restaurant business.
Voorhees still resides on Martha’s Vineyard, an island in Massachusetts, where Jaws was filmed back in the early 1970s. In the film, he played “the second child who gets killed by the shark,” in what happens to be his only movie role ever. But till date, every time Jaws airs on television, he gets paid handsomely. “It pays to die,” he told Sify in a recent interview.
Royalties isn’t his only source of income from Jaws as Voorhees has also started attending fan conventions since 2017. “I used to say, ‘I don’t have time for this,’ and then I said, ‘Okay, I’ll try it once,’” he told The Independent. Now, he gets paid $10,000 for each fan convention, excluding the air fare and hotel tariff.
Additionally, he also shares his personalized clips on Cameo, the celebrity video-sharing website, where he charges $35 for messages. The number of requests he gets every day can go up to 25, depending on the occasion. These perks prompted Voorhees to launch his own website, where he sells Jaws merchandise like mugs ($30-60), posters ($35), T-shirts (up to $70), along with the ingenious idea of selling inflatable life rafts with a huge shark bite in them for $289.
A woman even brought him a yellow inflatable life raft, just like the one in which Kintnter is killed in Jaws. “She was in tears and I signed the raft for her,” he said, adding, “I’ll be walking down the street sometimes and I can hear people saying, ‘That’s the dead Alex Kintner over there!’ It’s surreal.” He also recalled another instance in which a 14-year-old girl’s parents drove her down for five hours from Chicago, and she was “so moved to see me.”
A documentary on the life of Voorhees is now in the works as well. However, he’s not the only child actor who’s benefiting from a brief appearance in a Hollywood blockbuster as a child actor. As per The Guardian, Jason Weaver, who voiced Simba in Disney’s 1994 classic animated film The Lion King, has received over $2 million.
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Even Casey Margolis, who played a young Jonah Hill in Greg Mottola’s coming-of-age buddy comedy Superbad, has also collected $100,000 since his fleeting appearance in the film. However, child actors today don’t have similar benefits as they receive relatively miniscule amounts for their work. Also streaming services don’t pay as much royalty since their content is always available to watch. Lucky you, Vorhees!
