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David Henrie may have been a wizard on screen, but his Disney paychecks didn’t work any magic. The actor revealed that he gets “nothing really” in residuals from Wizards of Waverly Place, while a different TV role still pays off big.
Henrie, 37, opened up on the Monday (October 26) episode of the Good Guys podcast with hosts Josh Peck and Ben Soffer. When Soffer asked if he gets residuals from the hit Disney Channel sitcom, Henrie didn’t sugarcoat it.
“Not really, no. Disney was very, I think it was after at that time they hadn’t combined, so there really wasn’t much residuals. Maybe a little bit here and there, but nothing really,” he said, according to Entertainment Weekly.
Henrie played “Justin Russo,” the older brother of Selena Gomez’s “Alex Russo,” on the series from 2007 to 2012. He later reprised the role and served as an executive producer on the sequel series Wizards Beyond Waverly Place.
His experience on How I Met Your Mother was a different story. Henrie played “Luke Mosby,” one of the kids listening to their dad tell the story of how he met their mom. He said he filmed 30 episodes’ worth of scenes that were used across 90 episodes, which added up to much bigger checks.
“The network stuff that I did, like How I Met Your Mother, was a completely different thing. Network TV took really good care of their people, but I don’t know what it was about kids television,” he explained.
One check was so big that he didn’t believe it. “I went and got a residual check out of the mail and I saw it and I thought it was a joke,” Henrie recalled. “So, I called my like business manager and I was like, ‘Hey, they made a mistake. Like that there’s no way. I think they added a zero on accident.’ And they’re like, ‘Nope, that’s it.’”
Peck, who got his start on Nickelodeon’s Drake & Josh, said he got “nothing” from his kids’ TV residuals too, USA Today reported. Henrie didn’t share dollar amounts for either show.