50 Cent Reveals How Much He Made to Play Kanan Stark on ‘Power’: ‘I Took a Pay Cut to Be There’

You’d be surprised by how much 50 Cent was making per episode during his time playing the role Kanan Stark on his hit series Power.

The Queens mogul recently sat down with GQ to talk about his most iconic films and spoke on his friction with writer and showrunner Courtney Kemp Agboh and the show’s lead Omari Hardwick while also revealing that he took quite the pay cut to play the notorious character. 50 began talking about how his name being attached to the show and his executive producer status made things “awkward” for Kemp and Hardwick once the series started to take off in popularity.

“When people have success for the first time in their career, sometimes they need it to be all theirs, right?” he explained. “So the difficult thing is if they have their success for the first time, and it’s a 50 Cent show. It is a 50 Cent show, like publicly people look at it like it’s ‘presented by 50 Cent.’ The story is from Southside, Jamaica, Queens — everything is 50 Cent tied to the show. The music that’s playing is 50 Cent.”

He added: “It got awkward for the writer, for the showrunner because she felt like it was registering as a 50 Cent show instead of her show, and that turned into … it got weird with her behaviors and the things that were going on behind the scenes with her, and then it also was friction between her and Omari because he was feeling like he was the lead and the star of the show, so she was having a problem with anybody that was leading the show because she felt like it was her show.”

50 Cent then talked about how much he was making per episode while also wearing many hats like executive producer and music supervisor. “I took a pay cut to be there the entire time that I was on that show,” he said, after admitting he had no issues about his character being famously killed off. “I was being paid, in the very beginning, $17,000 per episode while executive producing the show, being the music supervisor pretty much, doing the theme song, doing all the promotion and publicity. It wasn’t until the third season that they would accept the show on Good Morning America without me being there. I’m technically the star of Power until I introduced everybody to it, and then Omari Hardwick turned into the star of Power.”

In other 50 Cent news, he recently teased a collaboration between himself, his mentor Eminem and the late 2Pac for the official soundtrack of his upcoming role as Balrog in the newest iteration of Street Fighter, which is coming to theaters on Oct. 16.

You can watch the full interview below.