TVB paid Ada Choi SGD3.5K to star in a drama for four months when she first started

Hong Kong — It has been reported that many stars who have worked with TVB have complained about their low salary when they were with the station.

It has come to the point that even its own Ah Jie Liza Wang has called on the station to give her and her colleagues a pay raise at this year’s TVB Anniversary Awards.

Hong Kong actresses Ada Choi, Athena Chu, Catherine Hung and Monica Chan, the ladies who dub themselves Gang Fu F4 and have their own reality show Qing Chi Fan De Jie Jie (loosely translated as “Sisters Who Buy Us Meals”) recently open up about how much they got paid when they first joined the entertainment industry.

Choi, who has since shifted the focus of her career to China, shared that she used to earn “HK$500 (SGD85) for a show” when she joined TVB after finishing third in the 1991 Miss Hong Kong pageant.

“If [I were] the lead actress in a 20-episode drama and had scenes in every episode, [I would] only get HK$20,000 (SGD3,500),” said the 47-year-old. According to reports, a drama of that length would take over four months to shoot.

As for Chan, who was crowned Miss Hong Kong in 1989, revealed that she got paid a fixed salary which was “very low”. And apparently, that number didn’t increase for a long time.

“After many years, I met a new Miss Hong Kong winner and I asked her how much her monthly salary was. I didn’t expect that, after so many years, her salary would be exactly the same as mine!” Chan, 54, said.

Chu started acting before she graduated from The Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts in 1992, her pay as a TVB rookie was HK$8,000 (SGD1,400) a month.

What was revealed triggered much discussion online, with many netizens saying they were not surprised by the claims.

“TVB is famous for squeezing its employees dry,” said one netizen. /TISG