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Jon Heder was paid $1,000 to play Napoleon Dynamite. The movie went on to gross $46 million worldwide. It was made for about $400,000. Director Jared Hess was his classmate at BYU, and Heder took the lead role mostly as a favor. No agent. No union card. No points on the back end. At least not at first. Then the film became one of the biggest sleeper hits ever. Fox Searchlight bought it at Sundance for $4.75 million. In theaters it made $44.5 million in the US alone, and DVD sales reportedly hit $139 million. The Vote For Pedro shirts were everywhere. Heder was not getting rich. Not at first. In the video below, he explains why: "Like, I'll take a thousand dollars, sure. That was the most money I'd ever seen." He says other actors had union contracts that gave them points, while most of his money came as "gift checks from Fox" for promoting the movie. The money fight did come later, just not from him. In 2011 the film's producers sued Fox for more than $10 million in home video royalties. A court-appointed referee sided with Fox on nearly every issue, and in 2015 an appeals court upheld it. The producers got back only about $125,000. So did Heder get played by Hollywood, or did $1,000 buy him a career he never could have gotten any other way?