Saved by the Bell stars make surprising admission about residual checks

The cast of Saved by the Bell is pulling back the curtain on their residual checks from the Nineties sitcom.

After actor Tiffani Thiessen admitted that she makes “nothing” from the throwback show these days, her former co-star Mario Lopez weighed in on the matter, writing simply on X: “Real talk!”

Lopez, who starred on the show as AC Slater, has not returned The Independent’s request for further comment.

Thiessen said on Page Six Radio last week that the money from the NBC show, which ran from 1989 to 1993, had essentially “dried up.”

The former teen idol, who played Kelly Kapowski in the show, said, “It’s like, negative now. It costs more to print the check.”

She went on to tell the radio hosts that she did not “start making real money” until she joined the cast of Beverly Hills, 90210 as Valerie Malone in 1994.

Thiessen added about Saved by the Bell: “We didn’t have pull on that show.”

“We made nothing and we just did our job,” she said. “When we went primetime for one season, we got a little bit more.”

Most of the cast members were teenagers when they started on Saved by the Bell, a coming-of-age comedy series centered on a group of teenage students at a fictional Los Angeles high school. In addition to Lopez and Thiessen, the ensemble cast included Mark-Paul Gosselaar, Elizabeth Berkley, Lark Voorhies and the late Dustin Diamond.

Residuals are long-term payments to those who worked on films and television shows. Typically negotiated by unions, the money is normally sent for reruns and other airings after a project’s initial release.

Thiessen is not the only actor to address the realities of the cash — or lack thereof — that comes in when an old TV show or movie is re-aired.

Earlier this year, The Brady Bunch actor Eve Plumb revealed that she and her co-stars do not receive residuals when their sitcom airs, despite rerun episodes of the beloved show remaining in near-constant syndication.

“If I had a dime for every rerun episode, I’d pay off the national deficit,” Plumb, who played Jan Brady in the series, wrote in her memoir.

Full House star Jodie Sweetin admitted in May that she had recently received an extremely low residual check for the hit sitcom, in which she played Danny Tanner’s middle daughter Stephanie from 1987 to 1995.

“I got a one cent check the other day,” the actor said on a podcast. “There’s no syndication anymore because it’s all in streaming. Who gets paid for that? Nobody gets paid for that.”