Josh Peck has broken down the money he was paid for his work on teen sitcom Drake and Josh.
Josh Peck isn’t paid residuals for Drake and Josh.
The 39-year-old actor rose to fame on Amanda Bynes’ Nickelodeon sketch show The Amanda Show as a teenager in the early 2000s, before he and castmate Drake Bell were cast as stepbrothers in the sitcom.
Speaking on the Financial Tea with Mrs. Dow Jones podcast, he recalled: “We started out making $3,000 an episode on The Amanda Show.”
He later explained that the money he earned for playing Josh Nichols for four seasons of Drake and Josh, from 2004 to 2007, wasn’t as much as people would think.
He explained: “By the time we finished Drake Josh, so that was, like, 60 episodes total for the whole show.
“The median rate, the average rate per episode, was about $15,000. So over four years, we wound up making about 900 grand.
“But between agent, manager and taxes, we cleared half of that. We were making about $125,000 a year.
“[There were] no residuals on kids’ TV from back then at least… so the final episode, we were done.”
Drake and Josh ran for 56 episodes, plus two TV movies.
Josh, who has recently appeared in the likes of How I Met Your Father, noted that his family were never really financially stable when he was a kid.
He said: “I came from a lot of financial insecurity growing up.
“I had a single mom, only child, and we sort of oscillated between being lower middle class and then being broke.
“But she worked in sales, so sometimes we’d have a great year and I was getting a new pair of Jordans, and then other times I’d be calling my grandma to help us pay for dinner because we had zero dollars.”
This meant that the end of Drake and Josh, which also starred Miranda Cosgrove as Drake’s sister Megan, Josh had to quickly figure out his next step.
He recalled: “When we finished doing a show when I was 19 years old, I had a little bit of a runway, but I had to get to work.
“Because that certainly wasn’t enough money supporting my mom and I for four years to not have to worry after another year or two.”
Josh became critical of himself in terms of money, as he became a relatively young breadwinner of the family.
He said: “If you have it ingrained in you that you never want to be broke again, you will run like your pants are on fire for as long as you can. And I have.
“And I saw that in myself forever, just a deep financial insecurity that drove everything I did.
“And would force me to be very obsessive, in bad ways, about these small, little, micro transactions. Where I was really not good at looking at the big picture of things.
“I would punish myself if, for some reason, I got a late charge of $20 or something. Cause it just felt so irresponsible.”
Josh Peck admits he doesn’t receive ‘residuals’ for Drake and Josh role
