Patricia Richardson says she asked for equal pay as a way to not make another season of Home Improvement. The actress, who played the family’s matriarch Jill Taylor on the hit ABC sitcom, told the Los Angeles Times that she used the large pay disparity between her and her costar Tim Allen knowing the network wouldn’t match their salaries.
The actress reportedly wanted to leave the TV show to spend more time at home with family amid her divorce from then-husband Ray Baker. “I told everybody, ‘There’s not enough money in the world to get me to do a ninth year,'” she said in an interview celebrating 25 years since the show went off the air. “This show is over. It needs to end.”
To get them to return for a ninth season totaling 25 episodes, Patricia said the network offered her $1million per episode as they were wrapping production for the show’s eighth season. She says Tim was being offered double at $2million per episode.
READ MORE: Where is the Glee cast now? Tragic deaths, ‘bullying’ and ‘curse’ claims as show ‘predicted’ horrors
She says she went to ABC and counteroffered asking for the same amount as Tim and an executive producer credit on the sitcom, which ABC had also reportedly offered her costar, knowing they would turn it down.
“I knew that Disney would in no way pay me that much,” she told the newspaper. “That was my way to say ‘no’ and was a little bit of a flip-off to Disney. I’d been there all this time, and they never even paid me a third of what Tim was making, and I was working my a– off. I was a big reason why women were watching.”
As she expected, ABC turned down her proposal, and the show came to an end after season 8 in 1999, but the move caused tension between her and Tim. “I was mad at Tim because he was leaving me alone being the only person saying no, which made me feel terrible and like the bad guy,” she shared, “and he was upset with me for leaving.”
Tim and Patricia later reunited on his series Last Man Standing. She shared that while they no longer keep in touch, she “never stopped loving working with him.”
Carmen Finestra, who co-created and executive produced Home Improvement, told the LA Times that the show “couldn’t have worked” with Patricia and that he didn’t “remember one discussion” about continuing without her. Executive producer Elliot Shoenman shared the same sentiment, saying, “Without her, it just didn’t make any sense.”
