Josh Peck is getting candid about how much money he earned after starring on Nickelodeon‘s Drake & Josh for four seasons.
During a recent interview on the Financial Tea with Mrs. Dow Jones podcast, the actor looked back at 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 recalled. “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.”
Peck scored his first recurring role in the early 2000s on Nickelodeon’s The Amanda Show at age 13, where he met Drake Bell, whom he would later star alongside on Drake & Josh. “We started out making $3,000 an episode on The Amanda Show,” he said.
He later landed the role of Josh Nichols on the teen sitcom, which ran for four seasons from 2004 to 2007. “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,” Peck explained. The series consisted of 56 episodes, specifically, in addition to two TV movies.
“But between agent, manager and taxes, we cleared half of that,” he added. “We were making about $125,000 a year.”
He also noted that there are “no residuals on kids’ TV from back then at least … so the final episode we were done.”
Drake & Josh centered on two teenage boys with clashing personalities who have to navigate high school and family life together, as well as Drake’s devious younger sister Megan (Miranda Cosgrove), after becoming step-brothers.
Despite the show’s success, Peck knew he couldn’t sit back and relax once Drake & Josh wrapped. “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,” he said. “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.”
However, the Red Dawn actor also feels “very lucky that at that age I had to figure out what was next.”
Peck later shared how becoming the breadwinner of his family so young impacted his mindset on money. “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,” he said. “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,” the How I Met Your Father actor continued. “I would punish myself if, for some reason, I got a late charge of $20 or something. Cause it just felt so irresponsible.”
