Everything wasn’t all smiles and slime at Nickelodeon for some of its former stars they claim they’ve never received residuals for their work on the children’s network.
“Picketing today at Paramount. Paramount’s parent company is Viacom, the same parent company of Nickelodeon, where for 20 years Ned’s has been sold all over the world, and I’ve never seen one residual or royalty from it due to bad deal at the time,” Devon Werkheiser, who starred as Ned Bigby on Ned’s Declassified School Survival Guide, revealed in a Wednesday, July 19, TikTok post.
Werkheiser, 32, claimed that the cast couldn’t negotiate their contracts during the show’s 2004 to 2007 run because of their deals with SAG-AFTRA at the time. “That’s what’s being fought for right now, residuals for streaming services,” he continued. “Streaming services are able to make money, pay their executives millions of dollars and create an entire business without paying the very artists who create the art and their business decent residuals.”
He went on to call streaming services’ refusal to change the current residual pay practices “horses—t” before encouraging fans to support SAG-AFTRA and WGA amid their ongoing strikes. “Imagine a world where businesses that made money actually included their workers in the business model, where everyone benefitted,” he stated. “Wouldn’t that be a beautiful thing? Support the strike.”
Much like Werkheiser, Nickelodeon alum Giovonnie Samuels revealed via a Wednesday TikTok upload that she never received any residuals for her work on the comedy series All That.
Responding to a fan question that read, “Smh even if they were to put your seasons of All That on Netflix, you still wouldn’t get your residuals?? Insanity,” Samuels, 37, responded, “Fun fact No. 3, I never got paid for any residuals for doing All That. Goodnight!”
@devonwerkheiser strike stuff ••• @SAG-AFTRA @wgawest #sagaftrastrike #wgastrike #labor #foryour
Samuels appeared as a cast member on seasons 7 through 9 of All That from 2002 to 2004. In another Wednesday TikTok video, she explained that was one of the few “lucky actresses that was able to live off my residuals and able to afford health insurance through SAG” during the 2007 writers strike, which lasted from November 2007 to February 2008.
However, once streaming services began to “really kick off,” Samuels says she lost her SAG health insurance — and only received $1000 per year in residuals for Bring It On: All or Nothing on Netflix and earned $6.56 in streaming residuals for a movie she did in 2020.
Samuels concluded: “Bottom line, if you getting paid off of my work, I need to be still getting paid off of that work.”
The Nickelodeon stars are the latest of several celebs — such as Mandy Moore, Ellen Pompeo and Sean Gunn — to call out streamers for their lack of residual pay. Last week, SAG-AFTRA joined the WGA in their strike to fight for fair pay, better contracts and guidelines for the use of artificial intelligence in media.
“It’s a very serious thing that impacts thousands, if not millions of people all across this country and around the world,” SAG-AFTRA president Fran Drescher said in a July 13 press conference. “Not only members of this union but people who work in other industries that service the people that work in this industry. … We had no choice. We are the victims here. We are being victimized by a very greedy entity.”
