ONTD Original: BTS of Desperate Housewives and their 'Juicy' Salaries
-Im rewatching DH and...been delving into everything DH.....Desperate Housewives ran for 8 seasons on ABC becoming the longest running all female ensemble show in history. A title it holds to this day.
-The show would star Teri Hatcher as Susan Meyer, Felicity Huffman as Lynette Scavo, Marcia Cross as Bree Van De Kamp, Eva Longoria as Gabrielle Solis, Nicollette Sheridan as Edie Britt, Dana Delany as Katherine Mayfair, and Vanessa Williams as Renee Perry.
-Teri/Felicity/Marcia/Eva would be the shows "Core 4", the only ones featured in the title image while Nicollette/Katherine/Vanessa would be the "supporting" housewives attached to all promotional group photos though Nicollette lobbied to be added to the shows opening and failed.
-The show was known for plenty of bts drama, especially the iconic Vanity Fair bts photoshoot that would end up with Nicollette in the center but what also ruffles peoples feather dusters? Money....so lets delve into the shows Salary throughout its run.
-When the show started out it was reported that the cast of Desperate Housewives were pulling anywhere between $47k to $76k an episode. Eva Longoria had noted that she did not get paid the same as her co-stars starting out. But we'll talk about that later.
Eva Longoria made it known that co-star Felicity Huffman was the one who swooped in and helped Eva secure the bag along with uniting the Core 4 in an attempt to negotiate together:
"This did not go over too well with the others. But Felicity stood up for me, saying it was fair because the success of the show depended on all of us, not one of us," she wrote.
"This fight lasted weeks, but Felicity held strong and convinced everyone this was the right thing to do. And thanks to her, I was bumped up to favoured nations. It wasn't about the money for me, it was the fact that I was seen as an equal, which is how Felicity had always seen me.
-Once Nicolette Sheridan was fired and filed her wrongful termination lawsuit - her salary came to light. Sheridan was in the odd place of not being considered one of the Core 4 but more important than any of the "Husbands" as she was also heavily involved in 98% of the promotional material.
After describing her character as "sexy, overt, audacious," she looked at the jury of eight women and four men and began her testimony by describing her original audition for a guest role and how she became a regular. She said after season one, producers doubled her salary and gave her a $125,000 bonus.
Sheridan continued testifying that she received raises in a new contract (in the third year she got $125,000 per episode and in the fourth year she would get $150,000, then $175,000 in fifth year and $200,000 for the sixth year and $250,000 for seventh episode)
-During the course of Nicolette's lawsuit, showrunner, Marc Cherry, revealed that during Season 5 Nicolette approached the Core 4 and attempted to pursued them to join forces and renegotiate their contracts as the Core 5.
-Cherry went on to reveal that this did not sit well with Eva Longoria and Felicity Huffman who were worried that it would impact their pay and so they went to complain to Cherry who attempted to ease them by letting them know that he was getting rid of Sheridan for good this time.
-As the show was going into their 7th season, the Core 4....well Core 3+1 all lobbied for big pay raises: their new base salary would be around $325,000 per episode, up from about $275,000 in Season 6.
-The cast also had profit sharing in the show and when taking that into consideration would give them a possible $375k/episode
-While Eva/Felicity/Marcia all negotiated together, Teri Hatcher continued to go in solo and not negotiate with her cast.
-During an Actress roundtable Eva Longoria revealed that one of her male cast members attempted to persuade the female cast members to neogitaite with them which did not sit well with Eva.
-Rather then fight for a “second-tier” actor as Longoria referred to him, the 40-year-old multi-hypenate chose to do what a man would do in that scenario: fight for herself.
“I thought, ‘When would a man, the lead man of a show go, ‘I think the second-tier women should get a raise like us,'” Longoria said during the Beyond Beautiful roundtable discussion alongside Reese Witherspoon, Kerry Washington, and Elizabeth Banks. “I thought, ‘No, this is called Desperate Housewives. And we worked really hard to have the pay we had on that show.”
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3rd times the charm