It is impossible to imagine Arrow without Stephen Amell, the actor who plays Oliver Queen in the CW series, but, despite the importance of the character in fiction, the performer has not always led the cast of protagonists in terms of salaries. In fact, not only did he not earn as much as the co-stars of the series, but he earned less than them.
This was revealed by the actor in his interview with the Smallville ex Lex Luthor, Michael Rosenbaum, who presents the podcast “Inside of You” and has invited Stephen Amell to talk about the successful series who stars in the CW. In it, the actor revealed that he was on the verge of not doing the screen tests to be Oliver Queen and that he only did it for the HBO series in which he worked, Hung, it was canceled without explanation.
“I didn’t really care what the deal was,” he explained. “It was a fair deal. I had no quote. I had never been a series regular before; I was a series regular on Hung, technically, but I wasn’t going to be bumped up to a series regular price until the fourth season, if there was a fourth season, which there wasn’t. It was a very, very fair deal. I mean, the first thing they did was try to hire me as a Canadian.”
What does this mean? That if Amell had been hired as a Canadian, according to ComicBook , he would have received a salary but would not receive another series of bonuses, but his agent intervened in time to be able to close a better contract for Amell. However, although it was not the worst contract he could have, Amell charged less than his other teammates and was only the fourth or fifth best paid of the series, even being the protagonist.
“The only issue I had in the first couple of years was, I think, that up until the end of the second season I was the fourth or fifth highest paid cast member, because I had no quote,” he said. “They gave me what they termed as a ‘gift’ after Season 2; it’s them raising my salary without asking for anything in return. My thing was very simple. I just said, ‘Quite frankly, I work way more than everybody else.”
