I mean they’re not all super rich but especially in the USA and especially with actors or TV personalities it seems like the well known ones make huge amounts of money. Just picking people at random and doing some searching online, apparently Scott Bakula got paid $120,000 for each episode of NCIS: New Orleans he was in which totalled over $18 million. Some sources say that Sarah Sherman, who’s been on SNL for 3 seasons, is worth around $4 million. Why do they get paid huge amounts of money when most people, even if they’re at the top of their industry, make a fraction of that?

  • @[email protected]
    10•2 days ago
    1. The entertainment industry is not known to it’s job security, the earnings need to cover downtime as well.
    2. Agents, artists have agents who get them their jobs, from what I understand they are often paid a percentage of the fee that the artist charge, so not all money goes to the artists pocket. The agent also knows the industry and how much an artist is worth to the productions, if a movie has a famous actor, it can be a huge draw and vastly increase earnings, since the actor is a draw, they should be compensated well.
    3. When an artist gets well known in the industry, they have many more opportunities, so productions need to pay more to get the artist they want, this means booking a schedule way ahead in the future, blocking that time off from other projects.
    4. It can be VERY physically demanding to change their appearance from role to role, one role might require the actor to play an overweight character and shortly after that production wraps they may need to play a character in near physical prime.

    Note that I am not an actor or artist, I am an IT guy who has little inside knowledge, though this should be a reasonable explanation of what is going on