Kenan Thompson doesn’t disagree with Pete Davidson‘s recent comments about Saturday Night Live‘s shocking starting salary — but he says it is all part of the process.
“It’s pretty notorious that it’s more so about having the job than getting paid for the job,” Thompson, 46, told Variety on Thursday, December 6, before declining to provide any specific salary numbers.
Thompson, who has been on SNL since 2003, argued that cast members have to “pay your dues a little bit.” The insight came after Thompson’s former costar revealed that newcomers get paid around $3,000 per episode.
“Do you guys know what they pay us?” Davidson, 31, who spent eight seasons as an SNL cast member from 2014 to 2022, said in a video roundup for New York Magazine on Wednesday, December 4. “It’s like three grand an episode. I think I got dinner.”
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Jason Sudeikis shared a similar sentiment, adding, “I mean, you don’t make enough money to make big purchases. I think New York rent was probably the biggest purchase I made after writing my first year on SNL.”
Thompson began his career as a cast member on multiple projects at Nickelodeon. From there, the comedian joined Saturday Night Live — and has since remained the longest-tenured cast member in the show’s history.
“That first commercial when they paid me, it was $800,” Thompson revealed on Demi Lovato‘s Child Star doc in September. “I was 12 so that may as well have been a million dollars.”
Thompson recalled going from “rags to riches and then back to rags” again.
“In Florida they didn’t have the same labor laws. My mom met this dude either through church or the community who claimed to be good at getting you out of your tax problems. He was basically a con artist and ran away with my biggest earnings up to that point,” he revealed at the time. “By the time it was discovered, it was at the end of that Nickelodeon tenure.”
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Thompson concluded: “It was devastating because I discovered it in front of others. I was going to buy a house in Atlanta — my first home — and he didn’t show up with the f—ing check.”
The experience caused Thompson to reconsider his future in the industry.
“I really considered not wanting to act anymore if these are the kinds of things I had to go through,” he admitted at the time. “It was almost like I was forced to stay humble — if you will — because when I could have been at my most boisterous everybody knows my name kind of years, I didn’t want that because I didn’t want people to know I was struggling. It’s kind of the beautiful conundrum, the irony of life.”
