Melanie Lynskey Says Two and a Half Men Pay Rumours Are Wrong

Melanie Lynskey says the online claims about her Two and a Half Men pay are far too high. She told Variety that her fee started at $20,000 per episode and rose by about 5% each season. Her biggest single cheque was about $43,000, for one episode in the final season.

The story started with an Instagram comment. The comment said she had been paid between $200,000 and $300,000 for each episode. Lynskey responded to it, and Entertainment Weekly reported her reply. She denied earning anything close to a quarter of a million dollars per episode. She also said that claims she made millions from the show are wrong.

Lynskey played Rose, the neighbour of Charlie Harper, the show's central character, who becomes obsessed with him. She said she appeared in 63 of the show's 262 episodes. That means she was in just under a quarter of them, which is a useful number when you do the maths on the rumours.

She also said she "felt fine" with what she was paid. She said she gets "annoyed when it's misreported," and she described the show as "wasn't my show."

Other cast members have spoken about pay in the past. Holland Taylor said she was never paid very well on the show and never got a raise, even after four Emmy nominations. Jon Cryer said his salary was a third of Charlie Sheen's. Sheen's pay was reported in 2011 to be $1.9 million per episode, a figure that has been quoted widely ever since.

The $1.9 million figure for Sheen was a 2011 report. Cryer's comparison is about his pay relative to Sheen's, not a dollar amount.

For anyone who watched the series, the appeal of a pay story is simple. Actors' fees are rarely made public, so when a number appears online, it spreads quickly. Lynskey's version gives a full set of figures from one person, with a start rate, a yearly increase, a top paycheque and an episode count. It is the first time she has put these figures on the record in this way.