Variety has released a list of the highest-paid actors on TV, and it was no surprise to see some of the Game of Thrones’ stars among the names. Narrowing it down to Drama Series, five actors from Thrones appear, all of them tied for third place. The only actors to earn more than them per episode are Robert de Niro, who earns US$ 775,000 for an untitled David O. Russell project coming to Amazon, and Mark Harmon, who gets $525,000 per episode from CBS to play Leroy Gibbs in NCIS.
From Game of Thrones, we have Emilia Clarke (Daenerys Targaryen), Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (Jaime Lannister), Peter Dinklage (Tyrion Lannister), Kit Harington (Jon Snow) and Lena Headey (Cersei Lannister), all of whom earn $ 500,000 per episode.
Although a $500,000 deposit would make us all feel like a Lannister, these salaries are actually low compared to what actors on some of TV’s biggest comedies make. Clarke, Harington, and the rest earn just over half of the $900,000 the principal actors on The Big Bang Theory (Kaley Cuoco, Johnny Galecki, Simon Helberg, Kunal Nayyar, and Jim Parsons) bring down per episode. Meanwhile, Dwayne Johnson, who gets a paycheck from HBO, earns $650,000 for every half-hour episode of Ballers.
It might seem strange that the stars of the most popular TV show in the world (and one of the most expensive) are not the highest paid ones on Variety’s list, but let’s remember that they have to share the HBO budget with the biggest battle ever filmed for TV, not to mention the cost of having three CGI dragons — those guys probably cost as much as some of the human actors.
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