Actress Meagan Good recently shared that filmmaker Tyler Perry, who rose from homelessness to Hollywood fame with his Madea franchise, has paid her more than any other studio or producer throughout her career. Good’s remarks align with those of other Black actors and actresses, who commend Perry for acknowledging their value and compensating them fairly.
First Good Check
During a recent visit with Shannon Sharpe on his “Club Shay Shay” podcast, Good talked about working on her new film “Divorce in the Black” with Tyler Perry Studios. While Good has had a successful career, which has spanned over four different decades, she says she has never been paid as well for her work as she was when working with Perry.
“Tyler Perry’s the first person who paid me what I should get paid,” she said, adding, he actually told her to name her price — something she was unprepared to even do.
“He said, ‘How much you want?’ I said, ‘Let me let me talk to my team, you know, really quick,’ and he said, ‘Just tell me what you want,’” she recalled.
The “Eve’s Bayou” actress said she sought advice from her boyfriend, Jonathan Majors, who at one point was one of the highest paid Marvel actors in the world, set to earn $20 million, including back-end compensation, for his role in “Avengers: The Kang Dynasty” before legal troubles caused him to lose the job. He advised her to aim higher than she had previously asked other studios. Though nervous, Good submitted her informal request.
“So, I asked Tyler and he said, ‘I was gonna give you that anyways,’ and I was like ‘ohh’ and then I started crying and then I couldn’t stop,” she said.
Good said the tears came because Perry’s offer made her feel he “valued” not just her work, but her.
“I felt valued. I felt like someone wasn’t just sitting there and telling me I’m valuable, they were actually showing me because actions obviously are much bigger than words.”
Her co-star Cory Hardrict said the same thing in his interview with “The Breakfast Club” featuring DJ Envy and Charlamagne tha God.
“He paid me the most I ever made in the film for three weeks, really ever,” the “All American: Homecoming” actor said. “And I’ve worked on films five months with $75 million budgets. Three weeks. That’s why I say he’s a gift from God.”
Taraji P. Henson is yet another Black actress that says Perry is a gift.
“He isn’t solely about representing us on screen. He does so in a major way behind the scenes,” she said during 2019 BET Awards. “In the time, where my counterparts were making way more money than I was, I was only making a fraction of what most of them were making, Tyler Perry was the 1st to pay me my worth.”
Adding, that he gave her her “first real quote in Hollywood.”
Perry, a $1.4 billion mogul, owns the expansive Tyler Perry Studios in Atlanta. His wealth stems from his producer earnings and a comprehensive content library dating back to the early 1990s, which he owns entirely. After seven years of creating content for Oprah Winfrey’s OWN, Perry inked a similar deal with Viacom in 2019, securing 25 percent of the streaming service BET+. Forbes listed him as Hollywood’s eighth-highest-paid entertainer in 2022, reflecting his significant earnings and influence.
However, while Perry is renowned for compensating actors generously, his stance on writers’ compensation has been controversial. Perry prefers non-union writers, a choice he defended in a 2020 interview. This decision contrasts sharply with the Writers Guild of America (WGA), which once filed an unfair labor practice claim against him, alleging that four “House of Payne” writers were dismissed for pursuing contract negotiations.
Perry’s lawyer argued their termination was due to performance issues, not union activities.
