Off to the bank! Drake revealed that he is still receiving royalty payments from Degrassi: The Next Generation in a hilarious Instagram post on Tuesday, July 18.
“Degrassi money still coming in don’t sleeeeeeeep…???????,” he captioned a photo of the $8.25 check, which was dated back to March 31.
The“Passionfruit” rapper, 30, appeared on the Canadian TV series from 2001-2007 for eight consecutive seasons, playing wheelchair-bound high school basketball star Jimmy Brooks.
The Grammy winner opened up about the acting gig in a 2011 interview. “My mother was very sick. We were poor, like broke. The only money I had was coming in off of Canadian TV, which wasn’t much money when you break it down,” he told Complex at the time. “A season of Canadian television is under a teacher’s salary, I’ll tell you that much.”
He added to W Magazine in 2015: “Back then, I’d spend a full day on set and then go to the studio to make music until 4 or 5 a.m. I’d sleep in my dressing room and then be in front of the cameras again by 9 a.m. Eventually, they realized I was juggling two professions and told me I had to choose. I chose this life.”
The music producer, who released his fifth studio album More Life in March, has also alluded to his Degrassi days on several of his early tracks. “They like, ‘Damn who’s Drake, where’s wheelchair Jimmy at?” he rapped on his 2007 song “The Presentation.”
In his song “You Know, You Know” produced by Kanye West, the Canadian native crooned, “I’m the reason you can find my city on an atlas page / Half a million dollars later and my taxes paid / And I’m still spendin’ money from my actin days.”
Canadian fans of the teen soap opera paid homage to Drake’s performance by plastering pictures of his face on wheelchair signs throughout Toronto in 2014. When asked by TMZ at the time what he thought of the trend dubbed as “Draking,” he replied, “It’s great.”
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