Mario Lopez Reacts to Tiffani Thiessen Saying ‘Saved by the Bell’ Cast Residue is Now ‘Negative’
Key Points
Mario Lopez affirmed his Saved by the Bell co-star Tiffani Thiessen’s claim that they make “negative” money from their residual checks.
Thiessen previously explained that she only started “making real money” after joining Beverly Hills, 90210.
Their partner Mark-Paul Gosselaar once said the actors signed “bad deals.”
Mario Lopez can attest to his Saved by the Bell co-star Tiffani Thiessen’s meager residual checks.
After Thiessen joked that his bribes for the teen sitcom, which ran from 1989 to 1993, were virtually nonexistent, Lopez called on X to back up his claims.
“Real talk!” he wrote on Wednesday.
Indeed, Thiessen recently spoke candidly about how much money she made for her most iconic TV roles. While her stint as bad girl Valerie Malone in Beverly Hills, 90210 That’s when she started “making real money,” she admitted that her time as girl-next-door Kelly Kapowski on Saved by the Bell brought him very little.
“We didn’t win anything and we just did our job,” she said in an interview with SiriusXM’s Page Six Radio.
And Saved by the Bell It doesn’t do much for him to date. In fact, she doesn’t expect to receive any residual checks for her work on the show at this point.
“I think it’s dry,” Thiessen said. “It’s like negative now. It costs more to print the check.”
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Tiffani Thiessen as Kelly Kapowski and Mario Lopez as AC Slater in ‘Saved by the Bell’
Credit: Joseph Del Valle/NBCU Photo Bank/Getty
It’s no secret that the show’s stars, including Thiessen, Lopez, Mark-Paul Gosselaar, Elizabeth Berkley, Lark Voorhies, the late Dennis Haskins and the late Dustin Diamond, earned low salaries. In fact, a recent episode of the documentary series Hollywood Demons shed light on how much Lopez actually made per episode, which was much lower than one would expect given the success of the series.
“Mario Lopez said he started making about $1,500 an episode,” Denise Simon, a child star manager, said during the episode discussing the difficulties of Saved by the Bells molded. “That’s a lot of money for a kid. But after a second season, in 1991, Saved by the Bell grossed about $15 million in advertising.”
Meanwhile, Gosselaar previously explained that the actors “did very bad business.”
“Bad business at the time,” he said on Watch what’s happening live in 2019. “That’s how it is. You move forward, you learn. Great experience.”
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