Former EastEnders star Rory Jennings has given an insight into how much the cast used to be paid way, way back in the day. The former actor played Lucy Beale’s villainous boyfriend Craig Dixon for a short stint back in 2007, which ended with the character arrested for attacking Patrick Trueman.
Around the same time, Jennings appeared on an episode of Doctor Who, a series of Post Office adverts, and the music video for ‘The Salmon Dance’ by The Chemical Brothers.
Since then he’s moved into football punditry, hosting a YouTube channel and appearing on TalkSPORT.
During an appearance on The Fellas podcast in 2022 that’s been doing the rounds online this week, Jennings spoke about what he earned during his time on the BBC One soap.
It should be taken into account, however, that this was back in 2007, and he was only on the soap for less than 20 episodes, while bigger names and longer-running actors earn a lot more per episode.
Jack Barnes/BBC
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“It worked out I was on £1,000 an episode but remember this is way back in the day,” he said.
“So you had the Sunday repeat, do you remember the Sunday repeat? You had the omnibus on Sunday.
“So they would do… basically for people who were hungover, I think, from about 12 till 3 or something like that, they’d do all the EastEnders through the week on a Sunday repeat.”
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“You’d get 80% of your fee again,” he continued, “so you’d get a grand an episode and then 80% of that for the Sunday. So in theory, you could be in four episodes a week which would be £4000 and then you’d get 80% per episode [for the repeat].”
The omnibus was axed back in the 2010s, while BBC Three repeats also went after that channel went online-only. Now that BBC Three is back, the omnibus actually airs on Sunday nights on BBC Three now.
And of course there’s the fact that there are thousands of episodes on iPlayer for actors to potentially earn money from. Although we don’t know the numbers, they are likely to be quite different from how it was in 2007.
EastEnders airs on Mondays-Thursdays at 7.30pm on BBC One. The show also streams on BBC iPlayer, where most episodes drop early at 6am ahead of their TV broadcast.
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