Two and a Half Men, one of Hollywood’s biggest hits just got the lid blown off, by none other than Charlie Sheen’s on-screen mother, Holland Taylor.
Now for those who did not watch the series, it featured two brothers, Charlie Harper (Charlie Sheen) and his brother John Cryer (Alan Harper) who lived together with a tiny tot played by Angus T. Jones. Its synopsis is as follows; “A hedonistic jingle writer’s free-wheeling life comes to an abrupt halt when his brother and 10-year-old nephew move into his Malibu beach house.”
But while the two on-screen brothers stayed on for a number of seasons, their on-screen mother chose to walk away and this is the first time she’s opened up about it.
Despite being on-screen mother to one of sitcom TV’s highest-ever paid stars (at a reported $1.8 million an episode) season 6 was when she decided to walk away, and she’s opened up about her reasons just recently, on the Alchemy with Anthony Mason podcast.
She explained the whole thing in great detail, and has been quoted saying, “when the six years was up, I said, ‘I don’t want to be on a contract anymore but I will visit the show occasionally if you want’.” In fact, she even noted, “they were astonished because when your contract runs out is when people usually back up the [Brink’s] truck. And they never paid me very well on that show. I was paid on that show what I had made on a series like eight years before or something.”
She also went into a bit more detail to recount the conversation she decided to have over the payment issue too and said, “they said, ‘We can’t pay you any more money.’ First of all, I said, ‘You could actually pay me the cost of this building, but don’t bother because I don’t want to continue on under contract’.”
Before actually signing off she also gave a snub about the pay increase Charlie received and admitted, “They said, ‘But we can’t afford to give you more.’ I said, ‘I’m cool with it. I just will come back as a guest some from time to time’.” But “John quadrupled his salary or something like that. I loved a lot about that show, but they were not full of courtesies.”
