John Leguizamo has been the voice of Sid the sloth since the first Ice Age film opened in 2002, and the franchise has grossed $3.2 billion worldwide across all its entries. Now, on the press tour for Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey, the actor told Entertainment Tonight what that money did for him in real life. Variety

"It paid my bills," Leguizamo said of the animated series, explaining that the income freed him to work in theatre — the kind of stage work that rarely covers a mortgage. He went further: the Ice Age earnings put his children through college and bought him, in his words, "a second and a triple home."

That is a long way from where the franchise began. Ice Age launched as a mid-budget computer-animated feature from Blue Sky Studios, then a relatively young outfit. Five films and a spin-off later, the property ranks among the highest-grossing animated franchises in cinema history.

Leguizamo has voiced Sid — a fast-talking, accident-prone ground sloth — in every entry, turning what could have been a sidekick into the series' comic engine. The character's lisping, stumbling delivery is the actor's invention, built on improvisation during early recording sessions.

For fans of the franchise, there is more on the way. A sixth Ice Age film, titled Boiling Point, was announced in November 2024 with a release date of 5 February 2027. Whether Leguizamo returns as Sid has not been confirmed, though his involvement across every previous entry makes his participation likely.

What makes Leguizamo's comments striking is the transparency. Actors in long-running animated franchises rarely itemise what the paycheques actually bought. Voice work in major animated films is not union scale — performers of Leguizamo's standing negotiate fees that can run into the millions per picture, especially when a character becomes inseparable from an actor's voice. The Ice Age money was substantial enough to bankroll a parallel career on stage, where Leguizamo has written and performed one-man shows for decades.

The press tour where he made these remarks is for The Odyssey, Nolan's adaptation of the Homeric epic, which positions Leguizamo in a cast alongside Matt Damon and Tom Holland. The film is expected to be a major theatrical release, though no box-office figures are available yet.

Twenty-four years after the first Ice Age, Sid the sloth is still paying dividends.