Like many actors right now, Billy Porter is currently caught between a strike and a hard place. The award-winning actor has been forced to sell his home due to the lack of money he’s bringing in during the ongoing SAG-AFTRA actors strike. Porter’s not been shy about the fact that he’s losing out on high-paying roles, and he blames the selfishness of the AMPTP and people like Disney CEO Bob Iger.
“To hear Bob Iger say that our demands for a living wage are unrealistic? While he makes $78,000 a day? I don’t have any words for it, but f*** you,” he recently said of the matter. The discrepancy between how much Iger makes and how much the members of the Screen Actors Guild make is not lost on Porter, but it has led some fans to question how much he makes.
Billy Porter’s net worth: how much does he make?
According to Celebrity Net Worth, Porter has an estimated net worth of $4 million. The biggest source of his income, of course, is performing. Porter has been an actor, a singer, and a dancer since the 1990s, and he actually got his big break on the American talent show Star Search in 1992. He won first prize in the competition and was awarded a whopping $100,000.
Porter recounted the talent show during a 2021 appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live! He has fond memories of the experience but acknowledges that he didn’t get to take home as much money as people thought he did. He also admits to being unsure how to maximize his winnings since he didn’t have an agent or someone to advise him.
“After taxes, it was $44,000, and then I didn’t have a financial person to talk me through it,” Porter recalled.
“I’m from the hood, so I didn’t know what to do. I should’ve bought an apartment in midtown. I didn’t know that was what you were supposed to do with your money, so it just sat in the bank. And I got my teeth fixed because I had gaps in between all my teeth. I was trying to be a movie star, so I was like, ‘Well let me fix these teeth, these holy teeth!’”
What are Billy Porter’s most well-known roles?
Porter acted steadily throughout the 1990s and 2000s, but his next breakthrough came when he won the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical in 2013. He was able to parlay this success into a string of roles on wildly popular TV shows like American Horror Story and Pose. For the latter, Porter was nominated for three consecutive Golden Globe nominations for Best Actor in a Television Series – Drama. He also became the first gay black man to win a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Actor in a Drama Series in 2019.
NCESC estimates that Porter earned an annual salary of $300,000 for his work on Pose. He was named an Official Ambassador for New York Fashion Week: Mens by the Council of Fashion Designers of America in 2019, and despite not being able to act in films or TV shows, he is currently working on his fifth album. It’s unclear how much money Porter makes from his music career, but his profile is such that he performed alongside Stephen Stills at the Democratic National Convention, so we imagine it makes up some of his net worth.
While Porter is by no means broke, the lack of options afforded him by the actors strike is exactly what the AMPTP is banking on. An anonymous studio executive claimed that the studios intend to “drag [things] on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses.” We wish Porter and all other actors involved in the ongoing strike the best.
