Jon Cryer says he earned a fraction of Charlie Sheen’s pay on the hit sitcom Two and a Half Men, telling a new Netflix documentary that contract negotiations during Sheen’s final seasons pushed the lead actor’s per-episode pay to nearly $2 million while Cryer received substantially less.
In the film aka Charlie Sheen, Cryer recounts that his own salary was “a third” of what Sheen was being paid during the period when Sheen’s personal life was deteriorating. Cryer said his paycheck did not rise to $620,000 per episode until after Sheen was fired in 2011 and replaced by Ashton Kutcher, who was reportedly paid about $700,000 per episode.
Cryer told documentary filmmakers that CBS was negotiating with Sheen while the actor was struggling with addiction and erratic behavior. He compared the network’s handling of Sheen to foreign policy toward an unpredictable leader, saying Sheen’s negotiations “went off the charts because his life was falling apart,” and adding, “Me, whose life was pretty good at that time, I got a third of that.”
Industry and public attention to the show’s pay disparity has been renewed by the documentary, which traces Sheen’s career, relationships and battles with substances. Sheen was dismissed from Two and a Half Men in 2011 after public clashes with the show’s creator, Chuck Lorre, and remarks about his compensation and colleagues. After his departure Sheen mounted a public tour; the series continued for four more seasons with Kutcher in a lead role.
The documentary includes interviews with several people from Sheen’s life and career. Among those interviewed are actor Sean Penn and two of Sheen’s ex-wives, Denise Richards and Brooke Mueller. Richards, who appears in the film, described instances when producers of Two and a Half Men checked on Sheen’s well-being and recounted a visit to his home when she and Cryer were present.
Richards said she brought food to Sheen and later saw sex workers in the house, an episode she described while recounting the producers’ concern for his condition. The documentary also addresses Sheen’s disclosure of his HIV diagnosis and his admission that he had sex with men while using drugs, material that has drawn fresh media scrutiny.
Cryer’s comments in the documentary frame the financial disparity as a consequence of both Sheen’s star power and the business pressures facing the network. Cryer said CBS was under pressure to reach terms because it had already “pre-sold a couple extra seasons of the show,” a factor that, he said, contributed to the network acceding to Sheen’s demands despite concerns about his conduct.
The revelations about pay followed earlier public disputes over compensation and control that had marked Sheen’s tenure on the series. Sources and participants in the documentary provide additional context about how the program continued without Sheen and how the industry responded to his public struggles. The program is part of a recent wave of retrospectives that revisit high-profile TV personalities and the business decisions that shaped long-running series.