*As an accomplished actor with classic roles to his name, it’s hard to imagine Lorenz Tate earning less than a great payday. Yet that’s what happened to the “Love Jones” star when he first joined the cast for the popular show “Power.”
Although his agents felt he should be on a primetime show or guest star on another show, Tate stuck to his guns and opted for the smaller paycheck in working for “peanuts” upon signing on for “Power.:
“I got paid literally peanuts compared to what I got to,” he recently told the crowd during the Building Wealth Today for Tomorrow (BWTT) Financial Empowerment Summit in Chicago as dished on the back and forth between him and his agents. “My agents went crazy. ‘Why are you doing this? You didn’t tell us.’ I said, ‘Because I don’t need your permission to do the thing that I wanna do with the community that makes sense to me.’”
Tate’s interest in “Power” proved winning, with him playing an intellectual figure in the form of Councilman Rashad Tate, Afrotech noted. The actor’s guest appearance on “Power” resulted in him being asked to return to the series. Tate’s agents were still wary of the hit series, but he pressed on with help from a lawyer who he viewed as a “brother that understands.”
When it was all said and done, Tate’s final earnings from playing Councilman Tate made up for the initial pay cut he took to get a foot in the “Power” universe.
“The agent’s like, ‘Are you sure you want to be on that show?’ I said, ‘Here is the deal. I’m gonna negotiate this without y’all’… When we started to negotiate the kind of money that we got, oh, they was like, ‘This is the best show. This is great.’ And of course that was their last check., he said.
“Transformational moments in my career, this is what I’m talking about,” Tate added.” I started this process on ‘Power’ by making a small amount so much that after taxes and paying everybody, I didn’t have any money. It was basically, I did it on the love, but I was okay with it because it spoke to my spirit, it spoke to me, it spoke to y’all. I didn’t know that it would ultimately gain me more involvement with the show. And the more I got involved with the show, the more value that the network understood I had. So y’all know how valuable I am. So we went to negotiate. I made up all the time… We straight.”
In addition to “Power,” Tate reflected on his early years after moving to Los Angeles with his family to join his father, Larry, who worked in education for several years.
Seeing their area become impacted by a drug epidemic, Tate’s parents enrolled their children in performance arts schools to distance them from that environment.
“They got us into performing arts to keep us busy, to kind of keep us out of the streets, if you will…We never went to Los Angeles to become actors or be in the entertainment business. We just went there for some other opportunities, and thanks to our parents, they got us involved in the performing arts. And from there our careers have taken off,” the “Dead Presidents” star said during BWTT.
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