The Walking Dead: Why are Andrew Lincoln, Norman Reedus and others less paid than actors in other series?

Cinema 14 January, 2017

A few weeks from the return of season 7 of The Walking Dead, one looks at the possible reasons for the relatively low salary of the cast.
The Walking Dead has always so successful it has devised special episodes for Christmas and music in the series hoping to happen one day. But success does not always mean an exorbitant salary as we imagine (well when talking about TV stars) and the site Uproxx was found that the cast of The Walking Dead was rather badly off compared to those of Other drama television. Up Season 7, Variety recently announced that Andrew Lincoln was earning $ 90,000 per episode and Norman Reedus $ 80,000 . Certainly for us poor mortals, this is a small amount, but a sum pale next to the $ 175,000 Sarah Wayne Callies, Lori old, for his role in Prison Break . And if Norman Reedus and Andrew Lincoln seem “underpaid” while they are undeniably the two most popular characters in the series, we imagine that the rest of the cast receives less than them.
Although very popular too, for an order of magnitude, the stars of The Big Bang Theory Jim Parsons (Sheldon) and Kelly Cuoco (Penny) both earn $ 1 million per episode shot. Both say significantly more than those of The Walking Dead . One wonders if, with a large number of actors, AMC decided to pay its players less than other series to avoid spending huge sums but this seems unlikely when we know that at HBO, the five heads Poster Game of Thrones – Peter Dinklage, Emilia Clarke, Lena Headey, Kit Harington and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau – all earn $ 500,000 per episode. For Uproxx reason is simpler than that: where Game of Thrones must keep his players until the end of the series The Walking Dead can kill their characters at any time, making the complicated wage negotiations . The channel has almost everything to gain since in addition to returning actors who ask, according to them, “too”, killing characters always creates buzz and therefore often makes good audiences in the chain.
TVGuide had already noted that “kill main characters has become an effective way to maintain control over the wages of large castings” . Yet the situation has changed somewhat since AMC seems to have realized that Andrew Lincoln (Rick Grimes) and Norman Reedus (Daryl Dixon) were almost indispensable to the series. Their salary increased to $ 550,000 per episode for Season 7 and $ 650,000 for Season 8, aligning them with the stars of Game of Thrones and ensuring them work at least until the season 8 . This assumes that the fate of other characters like Maggie, Tara, Carol, Morgan or Eugene remains unclear but let us not forget that everything is above all a matter of intrigue. In short, these are some reasons that could explain the difference in salary of the actors of our favorite series of zombies. Waiting to see them again in future episodes and to alleviate some of the atmosphere, it was listed for you the 5 funniest moments of The Walking Dead! What do you think ?