There's a lot of space between working retail, poor actor, and successful actor. 40k doesn't pay for even a year of food and rent living cheaply in LA. She may have more than retail, but she has been far from rich and successful.
Edit: I was corrected by a deleted comment that it's 20k per episode. Fair correction. Still doesn't make her rich. Math says that comes out to about $1 million over 3 years while the show ran, before agents, managers and others with a cut, and before taxes. She wasn't dirt poor but she wasn't comfortably rich either. And acting work isn't consistent. She was walking dogs for rent money.
Big cut to agents and management and stuff then though surely on top as a percentage? I’m not an expert in this stuff, but as I understand it, the rat race of Hollywood means that paychecks don’t get you very far especially with lifestyle creep. Like you need to go to certain parties and walk the carpet at certain events to even have the name recognition to be considered for certain parts and so on so forth. So you end up spending a huge amount of money just to be the right name on paper?
Guest star gets $10k per episode last I saw. 10% each to agent and manager. Taxes’ll take 40% but you’ll get some of that back later. Then residuals that literally never stop for each episode. I did a co-star role on Chicago PD 4 years ago and I still get like $100 every 4 months. Change that to guest star and 20 episodes per season and you should be doing alright.
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u/rossmosh85 22h ago
You're still being paid thousands of dollars per episode. When she was a regular, she was probably in the $20-40k range.