Stephen Amell Reveals His 'Arrow' Starting Salary Made Him 'Fourth or Fifth Highest Paid Cast Member'

Stephen Amell is opening up about the trickiness of contract negotiations with regard to his work as the lead on the hit CW show Arrow.

“I didn’t really care what the deal was. It was a fair deal. I had no quote. I had never been a series regular before,” the 37-year-old actor said on Michael Rosenbaum‘s Inside of You podcast about when he first landed the show back in 2011. “I was a series regular on Hung, technically, but I wasn’t going to be bumped up to a series regular price until the fourth season—if there was a fourth season, which there wasn’t. It was a very, very fair deal. I mean, the first thing they did was try to hire me as a Canadian…That’s the first conversation that they have and my agent shut it down immediately. Basically, the business affairs person comes back, semi-embarrassed, and says, ‘You know, I gotta ask…’”

Stephen continued, “The only issue I had in the first couple of years was, I think, that up until the end of the second season I was the fourth or fifth highest paid cast member, because I had no quote. They gave me what they termed as a ‘gift’ after Season 2…it’s them raising my salary without asking for anything in return. My thing was very simple. I just said, ‘Quite frankly, I work way more than everybody else.’ Especially in Season 1 and Season 2…it was way more disproportionate than it is now. I think somebody was making X. They’re like, ‘OK, your new salary is going to be X minus, like, $1,250 per episode.’ And I go, ‘What are you doing? That’s not the most amount of money.’ They said, ‘Yeah, no. It’s the most amount of money over the course of 23 episodes, because the person above you is not all episodes produced.’ I was like, ‘OK, technically you’re right…’ That leaves a little bit of a sh*tty taste in my mouth. Just a little.”

“When I did my renegotiation, it wasn’t fun, because I have a lot of friends who have been in similar positions, and I knew what the actual numbers were. I’m very good friends with Jared Padalecki, and he shared information with me that [Tom Welling] shared with him. It’s everyone trying to help each other out, right? And I have gone on to share that information with people that I think it might be beneficial to,” Stephen added.