Steve Burns has made a candid admission about his time on Blue’s Clues.
Burns starred as the original host on the wildly popular ’90s children’s show from 1996 to 2002.
Now, the star has shared just how much he was taking home for the gig and revealed he was earning less than a waiter in the show’s early days.
Watch the video above.
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“I got Blue’s Clues early, but every waiter I ever knew made more money than I did for the first many seasons of that show,” he claimed on Rainn Wilson’s Soul Boom podcast.
The actor said the show was his “side hustle forever”.
Meanwhile, his real gig was a “voiceover guy”, which Burns said he “fell into that early”.
Burns did voiceover work for commercials which “kind of sustained” him but “was grim”.
“And one day I had an audition for what I thought was to be the voice of a cartoon on a children’s television show,” he recalled of how the Blue’s Clues opportunity came about.
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However, the star said: “If I had known that it was to be the guy on the show, I wouldn’t have gone.”
Burns explained it was partly because he was “a pretentious young man at the time” but also because “children’s television had never occurred” to him.
“Because I thought it was a voice thing, I went to the audition, and when I got there, there was a camera in the room, and I thought, ‘Oh s–t, I better do something,'” he said.
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“And so I looked at the script, and I figured … I’m going to act the s–t out of this.”
Burns hosted the first four seasons of the Nickelodeon TV series, Blue’s Clues.
He handed over hosting duties to his brother ‘Joe’ (Donovan Patton) in 2002.
The show continued on running until 2006.
In 2022, Burns opened up about why he left the show, detailing a mental health battle.
“I was struggling with severe clinical depression the whole time I was on that show. It was my job to be utterly and completely full of joy and wonder at all times, and that became impossible,” he told Variety at the time.
Burns made a surprise return in 2021 for a video to mark the show’s 25th anniversary.
He also returned for a spinoff film, Blue’s Clues & Blue’s Clues & You!.
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