Though This Is Us is one of the most beloved television shows of recent memory, one of its stars is opening up about how much she makes from streaming residuals checks—and, um, it’s not as much money as you might think.
In fact, it is literally pennies, Mandy Moore—who played lead character Rebecca Pearson on the show from 2016 to 2022—said while picketing outside Disney in Burbank, California as part of the SAG-AFTRA strike. Per Page Six, Moore “revealed she gets paid next to nothing when fans stream her hit show This Is Us—despite the Emmy-winning series being one of the most popular TV shows in the last seven years,” the outlet reports.
Moore spoke to The Hollywood Reporter about the importance of the strike, telling the outlet “The residual issue is a huge issue. We’re in incredibly fortunate positions as working actors having been on shows that found tremendous success in one way or another…but many actors in our position for years before us were able to live off of residuals or at least pay their bills.”
The residual checks were miniscule, Moore said, telling the outlet they were “very tiny, like 81-cent checks” from Hulu, which acquired This Is Us in 2017.
“I was talking with my business manager who said he’s received a residual for a penny and two pennies,” she said.
Moore was joined on the picket line by Katie Lowes, who herself starred on another successful show, Scandal. She said she too had been making literal pennies since Netflix obtained the show’s streaming rights. “If you are someone who has been fortunate enough in our positions to do 120-plus episodes of a successful show in previous years—10, 15, 20 years ago—that re-airing would be the thing that could sustain you on years where I did this smaller project or I wanted to go do a play or you have kids and you have a family to provide for,” Lowes said. “And that’s just not a reality anymore. The entire model has changed.”
The SAG-AFTRA strike comes on the heels of the Writer’s Guild of America (WGA) strike and went into effect last week after the organization failed to reach an agreement with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), the trade association that represents more than 350 major studios and streaming giants, Page Six reports. Fran Drescher—herself also the star of a successful television show, The Nanny—released a statement saying SAG-AFTRA had “no choice” but to go on strike: “What’s happening to us is happening across all fields of labor,” she said. “[Employers] forget about the essential contributors that make the machine run. We have a problem, and we are experiencing that right at this moment.” She added “We demand respect…because you cannot exist without us.”
