[imagesource: HBO]

We’re checking in with everyone’s favourite dysfunctional rich family as season four of Succession beckons from around the corner.

To make hay while the sun shines, we’re talking about the Roy family’s prime obsession; money, more particularly the salaries that each member of the cast managed to negotiate for the roles in season three.

While these numbers aren’t as whopping as the figures that Waystar Royco execs pull in on screen, the cast salaries are still pretty high in the world of per-episode TV pay.

According to a Hollywood Reporter source in 2020, the HBO show’s key players began with a salary of $100 000 per episode for season one.

Then, because the popularity of the show spiked, there was an opportunity for the cast to renegotiate their fees ahead of season three, noted Robb Report:

The Hollywood Reporter further confirmed that, although some ensemble shows will negotiate their pay as a unit for an upcoming season, the cast of Succession each negotiated their pay individually, in a move that would surely make the Roys and their loved ones proud.

This didn’t culminate with in-fighting and resentments as the Roys might have expected because the main cast all appear to have negotiated similar per-episode rates:

All the Roy children—Jeremy Strong, who plays Kendall, Kieran Culkin, who plays Roman, Sarah Snook, who plays Siobhan and Alan Ruck, who plays Connor—earned between $300,000 and $350,000 for each episode of Succession season 3. Matthew Mcfadyen, who plays Siobhan’s husband Tom Wambsgans, and his primary scene partner Nicholas Braun, a.k.a. Cousin Greg, earned the same range.

That’s just under R5,5 million each.

Brian Cox was the only Roy who managed to get himself more dough:

Brian Cox, who plays head media honcho Logan Roy, negotiated the most impressive salary of all: $400,000 to $500,000 for each installment. That’s on par with what Game of Thrones stars Kit Harington and Emilia Clarke were making by the final season: Variety reported in 2019 that each star had a per-episode payout of $500,000.

Just a cool R9 mill later.

WIRED got someone who understands corporate law to help us non-business-minded folk understand how negotiations work:

Season four of Succession will premiere on March 26, and since the show seems to be gaining even more momentum, there’s no saying where those figures will go when the series gets to season eight.

[source:robbreport]