From its record-breaking award nominations, viewer count, and runtimes, we already knew that Game of Thrones is all about big numbers. But the salaries of its biggest stars just provided further proof. According to a new report from Variety, the show's five leading actors each make half a million dollars per episode.
Kit Harington, Emilia Clarke, Peter Dinklage, Lena Headey, and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau each get paid $500,000 for every installment of the HBO hit drama, according to Variety's estimates. To put that into perspective, that's a lot more than the average person earns in a year. If you do the math, that technically means the actors made $3.5 million for Season 7 alone, which only has seven episodes.
The GoT stars' whopping salaries put them in third place in Variety's ranking of highest-paid TV actors in Drama, following Robert DeNiro ($775,000/episode) and Mark Harmon (NCIS, $525,000.) They share the same rate as House of Cards star Kevin Spacey and beat out major stars like Claire Danes (Homeland, $400,000/episode), William H. Macy (Shameless, $350,000), and Kerry Washington (Scandal, $250,000).
No need for the Iron Bank loans here.
The Game of Thrones Season 7 finale airs on Sunday, August 28 on HBO.
