How This Actor Earns $5 Million Annually From a Show She Never Starred In?

Jennifer Tilly has one surprising income source – it is called ‘The Simpsons’. Even though Jennifer Tilly had voiced a character in just one episode of the series over 20 years ago, her earnings today from it stand at an impressive $5 million every year. And it all came due to her marriage to Sam Simon, who had been a co-creator of ‘The Simpsons’. As part of their divorce settlement, Tilly was awarded 25% of Simon’s earnings from ‘The Simpsons’, including revenue from the show, syndication, and films. After Simon’s death in 2015, she still received 30% of his ‘Simpsons’ income due to a special agreement they had entered.

In a recent interview on Andy Cohen’s show, Tilly fondly recalled her ex-husband, saying, “My ex-husband was Sam Simon, who created ‘The Simpsons’. I was married to him for seven years, and we were together for about 10 years. When we got divorced, I got a piece of ‘The Simpsons’ in the divorce settlement, and nobody knew the show was going to go on for trillions of years. So every day, honestly, every day, I’m like, ‘Thank you, Sam.'”

Thanks to this steady paycheck, Tilly can now pick and choose which movies she wants to be in and has pursued poker as a secondary career. Living with professional poker player Phil Laak since 2004, Tilly has had an accomplished poker career too. In 2005, she even won a World Series of Poker bracelet and took first prize in the World Poker Tour Ladies Invitational Tournament. After a short break, she returned to poker in 2010, and by 2019, her live tournament winnings had surpassed $1 million.