Steve Burns Reveals How Small His Blue’s Clues Salary Was

• Steve Burns says his salary on the first few seasons of Blue’s Clues wasn’t enough to live off of — and that the role was really a side hustle
• In an interview on the podcast Soul Boom, Burns speaks about how he got the role “by accident,” and had intended to do more serious acting
• “I was really fortunate, because Blue’s Clues was my side hustle forever,” he says. “My real gig was, I was a voiceover guy. I fell into that early.”

Steve Burns is opening up about his time on the Nickelodeon children’s show Blue’s Clues, saying in a new interview that he was a struggling voiceover actor even as the show itself was successful.

On Thursday, May 1, in an episode of the Rainn Wilson podcast Soul Boom, Burns, now 51, said he studied acting while attending college in Pennsylvania and came to Blue’s Clues “entirely by accident.”

“I was in college in a very small theater school in Pennsylvania, and I had won an award in my little regional thing,” Burns recounted. “And then that advanced, and eventually, I won an award at the Kennedy Center for being a swell actor.”

In the early 1990s, Burns moved to New York City, with dreams of being “an unknown actor who did Off-Broadway stuff, or to be Al Pacino — one or the other.”

After moving to Times Square, Burns said, “I lived in a hallway. I built like a little shelf in a hallway between two tiny bedrooms across the street from a parking lot above the Army-Navy on 42nd Street.”

“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,” Burns added. “But I was really fortunate, because Blue’s Clues was my side hustle forever. My real gig was, I was a voiceover guy. I fell into that early.”

Doing voiceover work for commercials, he added, “kind of sustained me, but man, it 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,” Burns said of his Blue’s Clues audition. “And if I had known that it was to be the guy on the show, on camera, I wouldn’t have gone. Not only because I was a pretentious young man at the time — that was part of it — but also because children’s television had never occurred to me.”

He continued: “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—. I better do something.’ Yeah. And so I looked at the script, and, you know, I figured … I’m gonna act the s— out of this.”

Burns added that he had long hair and a pack of cigarettes in his pocket at the time, and “thought for sure that I wasn’t gonna get that part.”

Burns did get the role, of course, working as the host of Blue’s Clues from 1996 to 2002.

Elsewhere on the podcast, Burns opened up about his struggles with mental health and the rumors of his own death that percolated on the Internet for a decade.

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“My continued existence was an inconvenient truth, apparently … That was something I would hear from people. ‘Oh, I thought you were dead. Didn’t you die?’ ” Burns said. “And when it persists for 10 years, it feels like a cultural preference … you start to feel like you’re supposed to be.”

Burns eventually sought help, however, telling Wilson on the podcast that he began working with a therapist and taking advice from his own former character, who would often ask viewers, “Will you help me?”

“And it wasn’t until I did that in my life, in my real life, that things changed,” he added.