Another day, yet another meeting with an eager young aspirant hoping to walk down the merry path of paid acting work. It looks great on paper but it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny—if you want to be an actor then I sure hope your principal motivation isn’t money.
The Actor’s Equity Association is the union of professional stage actors and stage managers in the United States. I am a (proud) member. One of the great things about AEA is that they publish an annual report, which you can review on-line at their website if you would like, that breaks down exactly how the entire membership is doing in terms of finding work.
The most recent data is from the 2005/2006 season. Here are the highlights (lowlights?):
1.) AEA contained 39,969 members during this period. 17,566 worked (less than 44%). 22,403 union actors didn’t book a single job.
2.) Those that worked averaged 17.2 weeks of work during this period. If you forgot, a calendar year contains 52 weeks. 17.2 is 33% of 52. So the ones that worked, didn’t work much.
3.) 12,765 (72%) of the lucky ones that worked at all earned less than $15,000 from their acting wages. An additional 1,875 (11%) made between $15K and $25K.
4.) Approximately 2,926 people in this country earned across a one-year period what could charitably be called a living wage from their stage acting income (more than $25K). That’s it. That also represents just 7.3% of the total AEA membership.
Now I know what you’re thinking. “Hey, Matt, stage work is for sissies! I’m going to have a huge film and television career!†Well guess what—you just might, because SAG and AFTRA don’t publish equivalent information in a readily-accessible fashion. But I was able to find this much:
1.) Wikipedia claims SAG contains about 120,000 members. I don’t know what they’re basing that estimate on, but it’s the best we have.
2.) Total SAG earnings in 1996 were $1.5 billion. That’s great!
3.) 80% of the membership (96,000) made less than $5,000. That sucks.
4.) 24,000 people in this entire country made more than $5,000 in SAG wages, at least in 1996.
5.) Most of the $1.5B is undoubtedly concentrated in the hands of major movie and television stars. Tom Cruise alone had two blockbusters in 1996 (“Jerry Maguire†and “Mission: Impossibleâ€), the latter of which earned him about $70M. Some of the other big stars that year included Nicolas Cage, Sean Connery, Glenn Close, Eddie Murphy and Samuel L. Jackson (in film) and Jerry Orbach, Sam Waterston, Paul Reiser, Helen Hunt, Kelsey Grammar, Dennis Franz, Teri Hatcher, Anthony Edwards, David Duchovny, Gillian Anderson, Kate Mulgrew, Martin Lawrence, Fran Drescher and the entire cast of “Friends†(in television). Please note these are partial lists!
Let’s say that half the $1.5B went to celebrities—probably a conservative figure, but we’ll go with it. That leaves $750M left over for the non-celebrities that made more than $5,000 in 1996. If we figure that about 250 people qualified for “celebrity†status, that leaves us with 23,750 non-celebrity SAG members that we know for sure made more than $5,000. Divide $750M by 23,750 and we get an average salary of $31,578.94. The actual number will be lower, as we haven’t accounted for the income made by the 96,000 SAG members that made less than $5,000, but we have a general idea. $31,000/year. That was the average 1996 salary of just under 20% of the entire SAG membership (the remaining .2% were the celebrities).
Folks, anything is possible when it comes to your acting career. As an actor myself it would be pretty hypocritical of me to suggest that “you’ll never make it.†Still, though, anybody that wants to make a go at an acting career needs to take a good long look at these numbers. If you can’t be happy without a fat wallet then it is highly probable that you will never be happy as an actor.
