Here is the astronomical amount of money Jennifer Aniston made from her role on Friends.
Aniston, 55, is best known for her role as Rachel Green, one of the six protagonists of the NBC sitcom alongside Matthew Perry, Lisa Kudrow, Courtney Cox, David Schwimmer and Matt LeBlanc.
During the decade Friends was on air, viewers watched as Aniston’s character transform from a sheltered runaway bride to an independent women working in as a waitress at Central Perk before ultimately pursuing her dreams of working in the fashion industry.
Now, living in New York City is not cheap, but thankfully for Aniston her role on the show provided her with more than enough to make a comfortable living.
The exact amount of money Aniston and her co-stars brought in per episode has never been officially confirmed, however, there are numerous reports online providing us with an idea of how much it pays to be a main character on a popular TV series.
According to an Entertainment Weekly article from 2000, the cast were each paid around $75,000 (£57,225) per episode in the earlier years, which would go up as as the show’s profile – and their star power – increased.
By seasons 7 and 8, the fee is said to have risen to a whopping $750,000 (£572,283) per episode, which isn’t bad at all considering there was 24 episodes in each of the two seasons, meaning the actors would have made around $18,000,000 a season.
Which is certainly enough to comfortably afford the rent of a two bedroom apartment in West Village, which is where Rachel and Monica (Cox) lived for majority of the show.
However, this isn’t the highest salary Aniston and her co-stars were able to negotiate, with the last two seasons of Friends seeing the cast members pull in a massive $1 million (£762,050) per episode, per a report from Forbes.
The major payout caused the actors to earn the title of highest paid TV actors at the time, a record which would only be broken by the main stars of Game of Thrones and The Big Bang Theory in their final seasons.
These figures don’t factor in money made from royalties and residuals either, which means the cast will still be making money from a show which ended two decades ago.
With a wage like this you’d think that Aniston wouldn’t have to work again, right? However, the actress has since gone on to solidify her star power even further, negotiating a fee of $2 million (£1,982,000) an episode for her more recent series The Morning Show (according to a report from The Hollywood Reporter).