According to The Hollywood Reporter, a number of actors and actresses have revealed how little they were really making from TV and films. On Monday, actress Tommy Dorfman (Insatiable, Sharp Stick) became one of the latest actresses to reveal how much she made working on a popular show.
Dorfman played the character Ryan Shaver in the Netflix teen drama 13 Reasons Why. Instead of revealing her residual checks, Dorfman revealed how much she was paid for working on her first season of the hit show. “My earnings for the entire first season of 13 Reasons Why were $29,953.24 prior to agency and manager fees (20%) and taxes. 8 episodes over six months,” she wrote on her Threads profile.
She continued, “I did all of the promo and had KEY ART for this show, flew round trip from NYC to SF to shoot for every episode, was kept for days without pay/working. I barely qualified for insurance. Within the first 28 days of release, the show’s season 1 garnered a total of 476 million view hours. This is why we strike. @sagaftra.”
13 Reasons Why first premiered in 2017 on Netflix and ran for four seasons, wrapping up in 2020. The series centered on a teen girl who died by suicide. Weeks later a fellow classmate comes into possession of audio recordings of the deceased girl detailing the reasons why she took her own life. The series starred Katherine Langford (Cursed, Savage River), Dylan Minnitte (Scream, Don’t Breathe), Alisha Boe (When You Finish Saving the World, Do Revenge), Ross Butler (K.C. Undercover, Shazam: Fury of the Gods), Derek Luke (The Americans, The Crossover), and Kate Walsh (Private Practice, Emily In Paris).
Many actors have gone public with their streaming earnings. Recently, This Is Us star Mandy Moore (The Darkest Minds, Midway) revealed that she has received checks for only eighty-one cents to a dollar after Hulu secured the series in a streaming deal. Actor Sean Gunn (Gilmore Girls, The Suicide Squad) also revealed that he had seen very little in residuals for the Warner Brother’s-produced show Gilmore Girls streaming on Netflix.