Much less familiar to the general public than Tom Cruise or Dwayne Johnson, actor Tyler Perry, who is also a producer, director and screenwriter, is one of the richest personalities in the world of entertainment.
From 2005, you could see him play more or less secondary roles in films such as Star Trek (where he played Admiral Barnett), David Fincher’s Gone Girl, Vice (in which he played Colin Powell) or still don’t look up.
If he held the title role in the thriller Alex Cross in 2012, Tyler Perry has never been the hero of a big budget blockbuster, and his name obviously does not resonate with the same intensity as that of a Tom Cruise or a Dwayne Johnson to the ears of the French public.
Yet he is one of the richest personalities in the entertainment world. Indeed, already in 2011, Forbes magazine placed him at the top of its list of the highest paid stars in this field.
In a new ranking published last February (still in Forbes), he came in third place with 175 million dollars earned over one year, just behind the group Genesis and singer Sting.
But how did someone who, at the end of the 1990s, had been forced to invest all his savings in writing his first play (and sleeping in his car before experiencing his first success) managed to achieve such a financial situation?
In the early 2000s, his plays met with growing success. This is particularly the case of his series entitled Madea, grandmother vigilante, in which he himself embodies the main character, and which is quickly adapted to the cinema. If the family saga has never really been exported to France, it has brought in nearly 500 million dollars in the United States.
Early in his career, Tyler Perry also created the sitcom House of Payne, which was quickly acquired by TBS.
Chip Bergman/Lionsgate Entertainment
Actor, screenwriter, producer but also director (he signed twenty of his films), Tyler Perry is a jack-of-all-trades who makes it a point of honor to be the exclusive owner of the content he creates. In addition to his activities as a filmmaker, he also signs a partnership with Viacom CBS, giving him a 25% stake in the video-on-demand service BET+.
In 2019, in Atlanta, he founded the Tyler Perry Studios, a complex which constitutes the largest film studio in the United States (more than 130 hectares), and in which, for example, Black Panther 2 or the Hawkeye series were shot.
“All the decisions I made, good and bad, all showed me the way to get here. So I had to learn to follow, to trust what felt like the right thing to me. to do inside of me, and move on”he said in an interview for Forbes last June.
With a fortune of one billion dollars last January according to the Twitter account World of StatisticsTyler Perry would be the richest actor in the world today, tied with Jerry Seinfeld.
(Re)discover the trailer for “Madea, vigilante grandmother”…