Nina Dobrev (Elena Gilbert, Katherine Pierce, and Amara)
Salary: $40,000 per episode
Nina Dobrev reportedly received $30,000 – $40,000 per episode, according to BuzzFeed. However, with the amount of roles that Dobrev was playing, she tried to negotiate a higher rate.
“It was a bit of a tricky situation because my contract only said to play Elena, but I was playing multiple characters, which doubled my work-load,” Dobrev explained to Entertainment Weekly editor Samantha Highfill for her book, I Was Feeling Epic: An Oral History of The Vampire Diaries, referring to her character’s doppelgänger, Katherine Pierce. “I had to be on set for double the amount of time, I had to memorize double the amount of lines.”
Writers for the show were later encouraged not to write scenes with Katherine Pierce in them so that they didn’t have to compensate Dobrev for both roles. “It felt like they were saying that all the hard work I was putting into it didn’t matter to them and that I wasn’t an equal to my male counterparts, and so that was upsetting to me,” she recalled.
Dobrev later revealed that her decision to leave the show after season 6 was influenced by the pay disparities. “It was just really important to me that at the end of the show, as a woman, I wanted to make sure that I was compensated and that I was an equal to my male counterparts on the show,” Dobrev said in the book, alleging that their offer for the one episode was “five times less” that what the actress made.
She continued, “That’s the only reason why at one point I almost didn’t come back,” she said noting her appearance in the spin-off, The Originals. “I needed to be paid parity to the boys. I had to put my foot down and say if it didn’t happen I wouldn’t be able to come back. And it wasn’t about the money — I didn’t give a s*** about the money at all — it was all principal.”
