Josh Peck has gotten candid about how much money he made after starring on Nickelodeon Drake and Josh For four seasons.
During a recent interview on Financial tea with Mrs. Dow Jones podcast, the actor looked back on his early start in the industry as a child star and the financial impact it had on his family.
“I came from a lot of financial insecurity growing up,” he recalls. “I had a single mother, an only child, and we oscillated between being lower middle class and then being broke. But she was in sales, so sometimes we’d have a great year and I’d get a new pair of Jordans, and other times I’d call my grandmother to help us pay for dinner because we didn’t have any dollars.”
Peck scored his first recurring role in the early 2000s on Nickelodeon Amanda Show At the age of 13, he met Drake Bell, with whom he would later star Drake and Josh. “We started out making $3,000 an episode Amanda ShowHe said.
He later landed the role of Josh Nichols on the teen sitcom, which ran for four seasons from 2004 to 2007. Drake and Joshso it was a total of 60 episodes for the entire show. The average price, that is, the average price of one episode, was about $15,000. “Over the course of four years, we ended up raising about $900,000,” Peck explained. “The series consists of 56 episodes to be exact, plus two TV movies.”
“But between the agent, the manager and the taxes, we cleared half of that,” he added. “We were making about $125,000 a year.”
He also noted that “there hasn’t been any leftovers on children’s TV since at least that time… so we’re done with the last episode.”
Drake and Josh The film follows two teenage boys with conflicting personalities who must navigate high school and family life together, as well as Drake’s devious younger sister Megan (Miranda Cosgrove), after they become half-siblings.
Despite the show’s success, Beck knew he couldn’t just sit back and relax all at once Drake and Josh wrapped. “When we finished doing a show when I was 19, I had a little runway, but I had to go to work,” he said. “Because that certainly wasn’t enough money to support my mother and I for four years so that we wouldn’t have to worry in another year or two.”
However, Red dawn The actor also feels “very lucky that at that age I had to know what was next.”
Beck later shared how being the breadwinner for his family at a very young age affected his mindset regarding money. “If you have the idea ingrained in you that you don’t want to go bankrupt again, you’re going to run like your pants are on fire for as long as you can. And I did,” he said. “And I saw that in myself forever, just a deep financial insecurity that drove everything I did.”
“And it would force me to become very obsessed, in bad ways, with these little, very small transactions. Where I wasn’t really good at looking at the big picture of things.” How I met your father The actor continued. “I would kick myself if, for some reason, I got a $20 late fee or something like that. Because I felt like it was so irresponsible.”
