Danny Pintauro, who played Jonathan Bower on all eight seasons of the ABC sitcom “Who’s the Boss?” when he was a child actor, made headlines in April after he posted a photo of himself on Instagram that revealed he was working part time as an Amazon delivery driver. Fans were shocked to discover the star of a classic sitcom was now delivering packages for a living, but Pintauro explained on a recent episode of the “Pod Meets World” podcast (via Entertainment Weekly) it’s one of several jobs he currently has to pay the bills since acting gigs aren’t consistent enough.
“When I posted the picture for [Amazon] Flex, I really didn’t… it did not cross my mind [how people would react] because everybody knows that I’m working,” Pintauro said. “It’s one of the five different gig jobs that I’m doing right now. We’re gig actors. Acting is one of the six gigs.”
Pintauro said his Amazon delivery gig pays around “$80 to $100” for a two-to-three hour shift, adding: “We have to do what we have to do to survive. We have got to keep moving as humans. We’re all doing it. I am not different from you in that sense. We’ve never been different from you in that sense. I don’t make money from residuals.”
The actor explained that he previously dealt with extreme fan reactions when he took a job at the Gap for the summer after “Who’s the Boss?” ended its run. “Somebody brought in a hidden camera and took pictures of me folding clothes and said, ‘He’s already lost all his money, the downfall of Danny Pintauro!’”
Pintauro’s “Who’s the Boss?” character Jonathan Bower was the son of Judith Light’s Angela Bower. The series, which ran for 196 episodes between 1984 and 1992, centers on Tony Danza’s Tony Micelli, who becomes the live-in housekeeper for the Bower family and brings along his daughter, Samantha (Alyssa Milano). When Pintauro first revealed his Amazon job, he wrote in the caption: “There’s no shame in staying in motion. Working hard while ‘not working.’”
“The entertainment business has been soooo slow, so I’ve been doing what a lot of people do — figuring it out, showing up, and taking the work that’s there while I keep building the work I really want. 38 packages today!” he added at the time.
Speaking to People at the time, Pintauro noted that “people overestimate what residuals from a sitcom in the ’80s and ’90s look like,” which is why he was working so many different jobs. He added: “I invested a good portion of that money, but I also used a lot of it to pay for Stanford and to get through my early 20s, so it’s not like there’s just been endless money sitting there.”