In no particular order, here are some actors who were surprisingly well paid!
Find out who made over FOUR million dollars an episode in 2020!
10 - James Gandolfini
By the last season of the huge HBO hit The Sopranos,
James Gandolfini was getting paid a million dollars per episode!
This meant that Gandolfini made 21 million dollars that final season of the sopranos.
However, Gandolfini could have easily not gotten a chance to reach that big payday.
The role could have easily gone to the actor who played Silvio,
Steven Van Zandt. He was actually offered the role of Tony Soprano
first. Van Zandt turned down the gig because he had never acted before. He didn’t want the
undue pressure and he felt that the role should go to someone with more experience.
And it was Gandolfini’s role in the True Romance that got him
an audition for the Sopranos in the first place.
Here’s another more interesting fact. No one involved with the pilot thought
the show would get picked up by HBO. Even the show’s director, David Chase, didn’t think so.
He began talking with the producers of The X-Files about coming on as a producer-writer
all while still under contract with HBO. It wasn’t until right
before Sopranos contracts were about to expire that HBO ordered 13 more episodes.
9 - Paul Reiser and Helen Hunt
Paul Reiser and Helen Hunt each made a million per episode for Mad about You?!
Who would have thought that they got paid that well? Mad about You is good,
but how many people would say Mad about You is their favorite show?!
Well, it was more of a sign of the times back then rather than the show itself.
Hunt and Reiser were riding the wave of rising salaries for TV actors. At that time, Friends
was THE huge show. And NBC was eventually going to make billions, with a B, of dollars from Friends.
The Friends cast aren’t dumb. They knew they had all the leverage. So in 1996,
they threatened to hold out unless they were paid more. At that time, their salaries doubled.
And that trend of holding out spread throughout the industry. Because of the cast of friends,
Reiser and Hunt were able to each renew their contracts for a million dollars per episode.
That meant a $750,000 dollar raise for the both of them! Imagine having your
salary quadrupled when you renegotiate with your boss! They also negotiated just like a
married couple. Their contracts stipulated that they had to be paid equally moving forward!
The sitcom was never considered a megahit during its six-year run. But,
the show was solid enough to earn NBC and Columbia TriStar hundreds of millions of dollars. But, the
show’s ratings fell sharply the year they signed their contracts. So did it make sense to give:
8 - Tim Allen A big raise from two hundred grand an episode
to one and a quarter million dollars an episode for the final season? Probably, because Home
Improvement was a huge show. Allen’s compensation didn’t only include his salary per episode.
Allen's contract also included residuals, and that meant he continues to earn money from reruns.
During Home Improvement’s eight-season run, the show always finished in the
top 10 in ratings during a season. But it was actually never a #1 show.
The show’s highest finish was 2nd place in its third season.
Tim Allen admitted himself that he wasn’t an actor with a wide range, but that didn’t stop him from
making a lot of money from acting. He made half a million for lending his voice to Buzz Lightyear in
Toy Story. By the time Toy Story 3 rolled around, he was paid 22 million dollars for that role!
7 - Michael C. Hall
Michael C. Hall isn’t exactly a household name, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t get paid! By the
end of Dexter’s run on Showtime, Hall was making 833 grand an episode. He was able to negotiate a
salary of roughly $20 million dollars for the last two seasons of his portrayal as Dexter Morgan.
How was he able to command those numbers? It’s because Dexter was Showtime’s highest rated show.
Hall had a much lower salary for the first six seasons of the show at $295,000 dollars per
episode. The math works out to roughly over three and a half million dollars per season of dexter!
Showtime ended up paying Hall roughly 41 million dollars total for his work on Dexter.
It’s really not that much to pay considering that the series finale became Showtime's most-watched
ever show at that time! Right?! What do you think about actors getting paid this much?
6 - Jon Cryer Everyone knew that Charlie Sheen
made bank as the lead of 2 and a half men. He was making almost TWO million dollars per
episode before he was kicked off the show! But Jon Cryer didn’t do too shabby either. He made
620 grand per episode for having to put up with Charlie Sheen and his Tiger blood for
so long! By season eleven, he was earning over $15 million dollars per season in base salary.
Two and a half men had been a hit for 12 seasons,
and Cryer won two Emmys for his role on the show in 2009 and 2012. By the end of the
series, Cryer was the only actor to have appeared in every episode of the series.
In total, Cryer earned over $100 million dollars in salary during his time on the show! That’s
not including any deals he may have signed for residuals! One surprising fact about Cryer is his
longevity in acting. Despite not exactly being a household name, Cryer has been acting since 1984!
5 - Kelsey Grammer
For his role in playing Doctor Fraser Crane, Kelsey Grammer was made TV’s highest-salaried
actor ever at the time! For the final two seasons of Frasier in 2002 and 2003, he took home a then
record $1.6 million dollar per episode! In 2020 dollars that’s roughly 2.2 million dollars.
With 24 episodes each season, that comes out to around $76 million dollars paid to
Grammer for the last two seasons alone! Today, that's still the fifth highest
salary ever on a per-episode basis, even WITHOUT adjusting for inflation!
Just as a comparison, Jerry Seinfeld made roughly a million dollars per episode
in the final 2 seasons of Seinfeld. Let’s be real though, it was that low because he was one of the
show’s creators. So he got a cut of the show’s syndication deals and made a ton more money
than just his salary. That may be a little asterisk, but no one can take away Grammer’s
distinction for being the highest paid TV actor in history at that time when he signed his contract.
Grammer got 11 consecutive Emmy Award nominations, and he won four times, so he definitely made
the show the success it was. And when you talk about Frasier, you definitely can’t forget about
4 - David Hyde Pierce David Hyde Pierce was the actor who played Niles
Crane on Frasier. To some people, he was the star of the show! Pierce surprisingly made 750 grand
an episode to play Niles. That salary got him on the list of the highest paid TV actors ever.
For the final two seasons, Pierce made roughly 18 million dollars per season.
That’s roughly around 24 million dollars in 2020. Here’s an interesting fact about Pierce,
he used to sell ties at Bloomingdales and he also worked as a security guard
somehow while he was going to acting school. This was AFTER he got a degree from Yale.
Acting definitely worked out well for him, because just like Grammer,
he was nominated for Best Supporting Actor in the Emmys a record eleven consecutive times!
3 - Jim Parsons In 2018, Jim Parsons
was the highest paid actor on television. He was paid roughly 1.1 million dollars an
episode in 2018 for his role on The Big Bang Theory. And it’s kind of surprisingly low.
The pay for network TV has been going backwards for years!
Parsons was #1 on the Forbes list of highest paid TV actors in 2018
when he made 26 and a half million dollars. It wasn’t really that long ago when Charlie
Sheen made 1.8 million per episode for his work on two and a half men back in 2010.
Parsons had been the highest paid actor on TV for 4 years running. And
that matches the number of times he’s won an Emmy for his work on Big Bang Theory.
But he was no longer the highest paid actor on TV in 2019 when
2 - Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon
Took over for their role in the new series, The Morning Show!
Aniston and Witherspoon were each paid 2 million dollars an episode by Apple. Apple made their
first serious move into Hollywood when they outbid Netflix for The Morning Show. The
only way to get Jennifer Aniston to return to TV was apparently with a lot of money!
The Morning Show alone cost $15 million dollars an
episode for a total of $300 million for the two seasons under contract.
4 million dollars go to Witherspoon and Aniston. But they’re actually getting paid
even more because they’re producing the show as well. AND they got some ownership of the show!
But 2 million dollars an episode is still nothing when it’s compared to:
1 - Sarah Jessica Parker Three point two million.
That’s how much Sarah Jessica Parker ended up making the final 3 seasons in Sex and the City!
If this figure is true, this would make this per episode salary the highest salary ever
in TV history. Adjusted for 2020 dollars, that’s over 4.3 million dollars an episode!
Parker received a pay raise prior to the fourth season. That means for the final
three seasons of the show, she made almost TWO HUNDRED million dollars on those three seasons
alone in 2020 dollars! Do these numbers sound right to you? How believable is it to you that
HBO paid someone over 3 million dollars in the early to mid 2000s? Let us know in the comments!
This was another instance where the main character could have easily been played by someone else.
Sex and the City creator Darren Star wrote the pilot with Parker in mind as Carrie.
However, Parker just didn't want to do it. It wasn’t until he begged her
and finally convinced her to do the show.
However, after they shot the pilot Parker still didn’t want to do the show whatsoever.
She apparently thought that her career would have been over if it continued. She wanted
to get out so bad, she even offered to do three free movies for HBO to get out of the contract!
Here’s what’s next!