Ahead of the season 8 premiere of “The Big Bang Theory,” Chuck Lorre’s hit CBS sitcom made headlines all over the world … but it had nothing to do with the content of the show. Instead, the entertainment industry was buzzing about the fact that the main cast of “The Big Bang Theory” — Jim Parsons, Johnny Galecki, Simon Helberg, Kunal Nayyar, Kaley Cuoco, Melissa Rauch, and Mayim Bialik — wanted to renegotiate their salarys in a big, big way. During this process, and particularly when their salaries were made completely public, Nayyar, a newcomer to this kind of fame, reached out to another actor whose sitcom salary made waves: “Friends” star Matt LeBlanc, who played Joey Tribbiani on the NBC hit.
As Jessica Radloff notes in her book “The Big Bang Theory: The Definitive, Inside Story of the Epic Hit Series,” Nayyar told Glamour that he spoke to LeBlanc and asked for advice about this level of fame, and the “Friends” and “Episodes” star was an enormous help. According to that 2016 article in the women’s magazine, Nayyar said LeBlanc told him, “The journey is crazy, the journey is long, and everybody’s going to want something from you, [but] just keep your sanity and stay grounded.”
“That’s what I reached out to him about, really,” Nayyar told Radloff in the book. “In relation to that, I would go home to India, and I would have cousins I didn’t even know come out of the woodwork. It was a huge deal for India, as a culture, to have an Indian character on America’s biggest sitcom. Not an Indian-American, but an Indian, from New Delhi, who sounds and looks like this. It was huge. I understand the cultural responsibility that I held being on this show. So as someone who had been through a similar journey, at least in terms of massive fame, Matt said to stay humble and keep your head down because it’s a long haul. That’s what [Lorre] had said to me, too. It’s not that I didn’t know that already, but to hear it from people who really have gone through that journey is very powerful, especially when you’re young and you’re searching.”
The Big Bang Theory cast felt very uncomfortable after the world learned they would make $1 million per episode
So exactly how high were the salaries of the cast of “The Big Bang Theory” as the show entered season 8? The gist is that, after negotiations and the acknowledgement from the cast, Warner Bros. was forced to admit that the show earned so much money for the studio that Jim Parsons, Johnny Galecki, and Kaley Cuoco were all given $1 million per episode; Simon Helberg and Kunal Nayyar didn’t start quite that high but “caught up” in season 10. (Melissa Rauch and Mayim Bialik underwent their own negotiations later on, with their castmates stepping in to help.) So how did these main cast members on the series handle the knowledge that the world knew precisely how well they were paid?
“The fact that those numbers in that renegotiation were made public was terribly uncomfortable for me,” Galecki, who played Leonard Hofstadter for the entire series, recalled to Jessica Radloff. “Where I’m from and where I was brought up… I mean, I don’t talk to my brother about our salaries. I felt like it put a certain target on us. It brought the parasites out and had a really negative effect on my personal life. I was happy to be that successful, of course, but I felt like I needed to become much more guarded. I would have been stupid to not be more guarded.” Helberg, the man behind Howard Wolowitz, simply couldn’t believe how quickly the news broke. “There are reporters that like to release the details of an actual negotiation in a deal,” he said. “You’re like, Wait, how are all the details of this meeting that I just was in already on this website and I just walked out of this meeting? Who knows? Money is a pretty complicated issue for most people, so it’s especially weird to have it so public.”
Some of the cast members of The Big Bang Theory worried that their audiences would see them differently
Apparently, Johnny Galecki had yet another concern about the publicity surrounding the cast’s salaries. “Now they’re looking at us differently, as these multimillionaires,” he mused before clarifying that nobody in the main cast of “The Big Bang Theory” went public about their money. “That’s not relatable, necessarily, to much of the world, to many of our viewers. I don’t know who leaked those salaries or those details. I have an idea, but it wasn’t anyone in the cast. And I guess it wasn’t a real hindrance to how the audience accepted us, because they continued to, thank God. Look, these are champagne problems, obviously. But none of us wanted that out there.”
As for Jim Parsons, he took it all in stride when Seth Meyers made a joke about the huge salary negotiation at the 66th Emmy Awards in 2014. After saying that he did, in fact, make “a sh**load of money” from the series, Parsons continued, “I don’t think there’s any bones about that. I did not feel the need to justify it. Not because I thought I deserved it in some sort of grand, earth-wise sense, while there’s starving people? No. It had nothing to do with that, but it was just the facts of the situation.”
Parsons’ view gets a little existential in Jessica Radloff’s book. “I knew then and I know now that that information doesn’t translate to everybody. Here’s the other thing: In my own way, it doesn’t translate to me, either. Do I think that’s insane? Of course I do! I’m very surprised at the way at times money goes around the world and where it lands and why. I do think I understood everyone was going to have their own rough estimates of our salaries, and always had. It was just until there was greater success and therefore money to talk about that it became a hotter topic.”
“The Big Bang Theory,” which still pays its cast members handsomely in syndication, is streaming on Max now (and probably playing on TBS as you read these words).