Steve from Blues Clues barely got paid

"Every waiter I ever knew made more money than I did for the first many seasons of that show," Steve Burns revealed in a recent podcast interview.

By William Hughes | May 2, 2025 | 5:23pm

Steve Burns in Blue's Clues & You, Screenshot: YouTube

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As far as get-rich-quick schemes go, “children’s TV entertainer” tends to rank pretty low. (You rarely hear about the opulent mansions and exotic lives of the actors from Sesame Street, for instance; Eureka did not own her own Castle.) Still, it sounds like Steve Burns—who’s been pretty open over the years about the general weirdness (and joys) of being “Steve from Blue’s Clues” in the planetary mindset—seems to have had it worse than most: “Every waiter I ever knew made more money than I did for the first many seasons of that show,” Burns said in a recent conversation about his career with Rainn Wilson for his Soul Boom podcast.

Burns—who also talked about the overall (i.e., not great) mental health effect of being asked “Hey, aren’t you supposed to be dead?” by strangers every day of his life for more than a decade—notes that, for a long time, he considered Blue’s Clues his “side hustle.” “My real gig was, I was a voiceover guy,” Burns explained in the interview. “I fell into that early.” In fact, he only took the Blue’s audition because he assumed he’d be voicing a cartoon character. “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, shit. I better do something.’ Yeah. And so I looked at the script, and, you know, I figured … I’m gonna act the shit out of this.”