Terrence Howard Sues Talent Agency for ‘Lowball’ Salary on ‘Empire,’ Suggests Race Played a Factor
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Actor Terrence Howard is suing his talent agency claiming that they failed to represent him properly in negotiations for his “lowball” salary on the hit TV series Empire — and is hinting that their alleged failure is rooted in racism.
The 2006 Oscar nominee held a press conference on December 8 and announced that he is suing CAA for breach of fiduciary duty and fraud, Rolling Stone reported.
Howard played hip-hop mogul and family patriarch Lucious Lyon in the Fox series that ran for six seasons from 2015 to 2020. The last two seasons of the series were marred with controversy by the offscreen antics of star Jussie Smollett, who claimed to have been attacked in the dead of winter by “MAGA racists” in downtown Chicago — a claim that quickly fell apart and eventually led to his conviction for reporting a false hate crime.
Howard appeared in almost every episode of the series but is now claiming that he should have been paid more for his work. And he feels that his representatives at CAA had a conflict of interest in convincing him to take a salary that was not befitting his career status, experience, and big name.
Howard says that CAA had a profit participation stake and benefited from maximizing profits for 20th Century Fox TV. He says paying him less led to more money in the agency’s pockets. He also insists that he was never told that CAA also had a deal with the studio even as it was supposedly negotiating for his salary with its own partners.
Even more, he believes his race may have played a part in the alleged slight.
“I can’t say for certain this was a racial issue, but I can’t imagine another counterpart—a white counterpart—with the same accolades, name recognition, and numbers that I had, receiving the lowball pay that I was receiving,” the actor told Rolling Stone.
Howard claimed that white stars during the years he was filming Empire were paid far more than he. Howard noted that Jim Parsons — who played Sheldon on The Big Bang Theory — was making far more than he was, even though by the end of their respective series, Empire had earned more viewers.
In the final seasons of The Big Bang Theory, for instance, Parsons was making a million dollars per episode. By comparison, Howard says he never made more than $350,000 per episode by the end of Empire.
Howard, who received his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2019, recently announced that he is retiring from acting and told the magazine that he is acting like a “whistleblower” with his lawsuit. He further said that he expects that filing the lawsuit truly will mark the end of his acting career.
He said he ultimately “drank the Kool-Aid” and accepted what he now feels are false claims that he would end up making a lot of money on the “back end.”
“You have all your agents telling you that you got the best deal possible, telling you, ‘Everything is good. Don’t worry, you’re going to get your money on the back-end. After we get to a hundred episodes, we’re going into syndication, and man, you’re gonna get paid, don’t rock the boat,’” Howard told the magazine.
“I drank the Kool-Aid. I believed that I was going to get paid, or that I was getting compensated properly, but I wasn’t,” he concluded. “I just didn’t want to piss off CAA and Fox. They’re big companies to go to war against. But sooner or later you’ve got to stand up, because they’re just trampling over the rights of the artists.”
Howard is not the only Hollywood player who has accused the industry of racism.
In May, actress Eva Longoria claimed that “white directors” are allowed multiple flops before it affects their careers, but because she is Hispanic and a woman, she is not afforded such leeway.
In March, longtime character actor Djimon Hounsou also accused Hollywood of “racism” and claimed he has been ripped off with his salaries for years.
Hounsou, who started his acting career more than 30 years ago and has had key roles in hits such as Aquaman, Captain Marvel, Guardians of the Galaxy, Black Adam, and Shazam! Fury of the Gods, blasted Tinseltown and said, “I’m still struggling to try to make a dollar!”
“Today, we talk so much about the Oscars being so white, but I remember there was a time where I had no support at all: no support from my own people, no support from the media, from the industry itself. It felt like: ‘You should be happy that you’ve got nominated,’ and that’s that,” Hounsou exclaimed at the time.
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