Jaws child star shares impressive amount he still earns from movie 50 years on

Clas­sic film Jaws is cred­it­ed with the inven­tion of the mod­ern block­buster as we know it, launch­ing Steven Spiel­berg as a major Hol­ly­wood play­er and mak­ing Roy Schei­der and Richard Drey­fus two of the most sought-after stars of the decade.

But it wasn’t just the main cast mem­bers that reaped the rewards, with five days of shoot­ing and one minute of screen time amount­ing to a lot more for child actor Jef­frey Voorhees.

Vorhees might have had a tiny role in the film, play­ing the doomed Ami­ty local Alex Kint­ner (aka “Sec­ond Child Killed by Shark”), but his brief, trag­ic appear­ance has proved unex­pect­ed­ly lucra­tive five decades on.

Thanks to his involve­ment with the movie, Voorhees, now 62, is reg­u­lar­ly flown around the world to appear at fan con­ven­tions, for which he is paid $10,000 a pop. 

The love for Jaws has also seen obses­sives chomp­ing at the chance to acquire per­son­al clips from him on celebri­ty video-shar­ing web­site Cameo. Voorhees charges £26 ($35) for mes­sages and can receive up to 25 requests a day on occa­sions such as Mother’s Day.

It took Voorhees some con­vinc­ing to jump on the nos­tal­gia train, but he decid­ed to give the Jaws fan cir­cuit a go in 2017 after years of being per­suad­ed and offered flights, hotels and mon­ey to attend con­ven­tions.

“I used to say, ‘I don’t have time for this,’ and then I said: ‘OK, I’ll try it once,’” he told The Inde­pen­dent.

“The first one I ever did was in New York, and someone’s at the air­port hold­ing your name up and the pho­tos. You make good mon­ey at those things and you go all over the world and meet up with real actors.”

The endur­ing lega­cy of his char­ac­ter inspired him to launch his own website,where he sells inflat­able life rafts with a huge shark bite mark in them (retail­ing for $289), mugs ($30-$60), posters ($35), and T‑shirts (up to $70).

“I kind of retired because it’s like I make more mon­ey off of Jaws stuff now,” Voorhees, who ran his own restau­rant busi­ness, aded.

Voorhees’ home is cov­ered with Jawsmer­chan­dise – and he is still sent gifts from fans.

“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 said.

“There was a 14-year-old girl cry­ing because her par­ents drove her five hours down from Chica­go and she was so moved to see me. I’m in the movie for one minute!”

The 62-year-old said the endur­ing love has giv­en him a sense of pur­pose, and a doc­u­men­tary about his sto­ry is cur­rent­ly in the works.

“You get a lit­tle high off of that,” he said. “You make some good mon­ey, and you make some peo­ple real­ly hap­py, so why not?”

Jaws is cur­rent­ly in cin­e­mas again for a 50th-anniver­sary re-release.