“Modern Family” star Sofia Vergara is TV’s highest-paid actress yet again. Forbes published its annual list of the world’s highest-earning television actresses and Vergara sits atop it with $41.5 million. The Emmy-nominated actress has held the list’s №1 spot every year since 2012.
Vergara portrays Gloria Delgado-Pritchett on “Modern Family,” but the long-running ABC sitcom only brings in about a quarter of the actress’ overall income. “More than half comes from licensing and endorsement deals with brands such as Head & Shoulders, Pepsi, and CoverGirl. (The rest comes from a variety of sources, including movie roles, her talent management agency, and speaking engagements),” Forbes details.
The second highest-paid actress is “Big Bang Theory’s” Kaley Cuoco, who earned $26 million this past year. (Cuoco also held the №2 spot on the 2016 list.) Most of her income comes from her $1 million per episode contract on “Big Bang,” as opposed to endorsement and licensing agreements.
Four of the 10 top-earning TV actresses are women of color: Vergara, Mindy Kaling ($13 million), Kerry Washington ($11 million), and Priyanka Chopra ($10 million). The diverse list comes only a few weeks after a study from Dr. Martha Lauzen, which found that the 2016–17 TV season reached a historic high number of black and Asian women characters. However, considering that Lauzen also found that Latinas in particular are consistently, woefully underrepresented on broadcast TV, Vergara’s long-term reign at the top of the list continues to be trailblazing. The numbers are slowly increasing but women of color are still underrepresented on television overall. So the fact that the Forbes list is 40 percent non-white is an unusual, but very welcome surprise.
Here are 2017’s highest-earning TV actresses, courtesy of Forbes:
- Sofia Vergara: $41.5 million
- Kaley Cuoco: $26 million
- Mindy Kaling: $13 million
- Ellen Pompeo: $13 million
- Mariska Hargitay: $12.5 million
- Julie Bowen: $12 million
- Kerry Washington: $11 million
- Priyanka Chopra: $10 million
- Robin Wright: $9 million
- Pauley Perrette: $8.5 million
