During his time on Two and a Half Men, Charlie Sheen was constantly in the spotlight. He was one of the highest-paid actors in Hollywood amid his drug abuse struggles. His co-star, Jon Cryer, reveals that Sheen’s chaos is what led to a major difference in their paydays.
Appearing in Netflix’s aka Charlie Sheen, Cryer compares the reason CBS and how Sheen managed to make millions from the sitcom to the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong-il.
“He’s in the midst of falling apart in every way that I can imagine, and he’s renegotiating his contract for another year of a show that I’m supposed to be on, too,” he explained.
“The dictator of North Korea was a guy named Kim Jong-Il. He acted crazy all the time and thus got enormous amounts of aid from countries who were so scared of him that they would shovel money at him,” Cryer said.
“Well, that’s what happened here. [Sheen’s] negotiations went off the charts because his life was falling apart. Me, whose life was pretty good at that time, I got a third of that,” he added.
At the time, Forbes reported that Sheen was earning roughly $1.9 million per episode of the sitcom, while Cryer was making $620,000. Even after Sheen was fired from Two and a Half Men, Cryer still made less than his new co-star, Ashton Kutcher. Kutcher was reportedly making $700,000 per episode.
Cryer also revealed in the documentary that CBS had an incentive to “spend this astonishing amount of money on Charlie” because they had pre-sold a few extra seasons of the sitcom.
Despite being in the Netflix documentary, Cryer has not spoken to Sheen since they parted ways on the sitcom. Sheen didn’t personally ask his co-star to appear in the documentary and chalks it up to having the wrong phone number.
