Marcus Chong

In 1999, Marcus Chong piloted the Nebuchadnezzar on the world's biggest screen. His role as Tank in The Matrix put him at the center of the global industry. But while his castmates signed multimillion-dollar deals for the franchise sequels, Chong ended up arrested for threatening the producers of Warner Bros. over the phone.

The dispute was about money. He was offered 250,000 dollars for the next two films, and he demanded one million to match what other supporting actors were earning. The negotiations broke down violently, and his character was cut from the original script without ceremony.

It was the beginning of the end of his commercial career.

Long before the cables and black leather, he was already a familiar face on American television. His adoptive father is comedian Tommy Chong. In 1979 he appeared in the miniseries Roots: The Next Generations and later stepped into the shoes of activist Huey P. Newton in the 1995 film Panther.

Mario Van Peebles directed that project about the Black Panthers. At the time, Chong was one of the young actors with the greatest political and dramatic promise in Los Angeles. So his fall from grace after the Wachowskis' success was even more shocking to the actors' union.

Nobody called him back for a major blockbuster.

The silence imposed by the courts

After the conflict with the studio, the phone stopped ringing. Chong shot a short documentary titled The Marcus Chong Story, in which he explained his version of the boycott and the alleged blacklists. In 2018 he published a book called The Arch detailing the pressure he faced during the filming of the original trilogy.

And the system doesn't forgive public cracks like these.

His later appearances are limited to low-budget projects or one-off episodes of television series. In 2016 he starred in The Last Smile under the direction of Shankey Srinivasan. The film was independently financed and had a very limited release in North American theaters.

The film was shot on an estimated budget of 50,000 dollars.