To the average person, an actor's salary typically sounds insanely high. Making millions in just a few months, literally getting paid to pretend to be someone else, and making royalties once the project wraps; it sounds like a dream job.
That's not to say it's necessarily easy, though. Plenty of celebrities struggle with their acting careers. Kerry Washington claims she has to attend therapy just to be able to act. And fans have watched stars like Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto make stunning and even scary physical transformations for certain roles (like when they both turned into ill patients for 'Dallas Buyers Club').
Clearly, this isn't a career path for the fainthearted. Still, some roles are a more natural fit than others. So natural, in fact, that certain stars go on not only to play a character for six seasons on a hit show but also two movies and a modern revival that's poised to pay even more than ever before.
Does it surprise any fan that Sarah Jessica Parker is the actress who once made ten times the salary of her counterparts? It shouldn't.
By the time Sarah Jessica Parker embarked on her 'Sex and the City' path, she was already a starlet. Countless '80s and '90s films had made her a household name ('Hocus Pocus' and 'Footloose,' just to name a few cult classics). And the showrunners just knew she would be a hit; Michael Patrick King explained that SJP's popularity literally carried the show.
King also elaborated that without the famous blonde, the show wouldn't have happened. And that's how he justified the fact that SJP made so much cash from the series while her co-stars made ten times less.
Multiple sources, such as StyleCaster, cite Parker's salary as $3.2 million per episode in the sitcom's final seasons (she shared producing credits in addition to being a main cast member). By that time, her co-stars were still earning their original salaries; $350K per episode.
For reference, that's almost a ten-time pay disparity. For even more reference, consider someone who's making a perhaps reasonable wage of $15 per hour working in an office. But the person in the next cubicle makes ten times that amount. Same hours, same industry, same office, and everything, but they take home $390K while the lower-paid employee earns about $31K for the year.
The only issue with this example is that in truth, the higher-earning cubicle employee already had a decade of experience in their role, plus was well-recognized in their field for their efforts. They also had fantastic hair. The $15-hour cubicle? Not so much.
Not that such discrepancies justify paying one person literal millions for a half-hour episode... Maybe Kim Cattrall does have a point after all.
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