For the 10th and final season of Friends, Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc, Matthew Perry, and David Schwimmer, but not Gunther, earned $1 million per episode. That’s also how much Johnny Galecki, Jim Parsons, and Kaley Cuoco are pulling in 22 times a year for The Big Bang Theory. (CBS tried to trick them into getting paid in Bazinga Bucks; it didn’t work.) Surely, the cast of Game of Thrones, the most expensive show on television, with the average episode this season costing north (remembers) of $10 million, is making even more. Nope. In fact, the HBO show’s highest paid mainstays, Peter Dinklage, Kit Harington, Lena Headey, Emilia Clarke, and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, are only (“only”) making $300,000 per episode.
That’s about to change.
Deadline reports that Dinklage, Harington, Headey, Clarke, and Coster-Waldau are in line for a huge raise. They “will all be paid north of $500,000 an episode for season seven, which has been officially picked up, and season eight, which is widely expected. HBO has not specified the size of the order… but speculation has been that both season seven and season eight would be shorter than the standard for the show 10 episodes,” likely seven and six episodes. (That’s going to make deciding which episode is the new episode nine very confusing.) The salary increase confirms two things: Jon Snow is sticking around for awhile, as is Cersei Lannister (so much for the speculation that her wildfire experiment might literally blow up in her face), and Tormund Giantsbane is underpaid. If Jaime’s earning $500,000 per episode, everyone’s favorite Wildling should be collecting at least $1 million.
He’s not very good at negotiations.
(Via Deadline)
