Kenan Thompson Got Scammed Out of Childhood Nickelodeon Earnings

Think Kenan Thompson was living large on all of that sweet Kenan and Kel cash before he landed Saturday Night Live? Think again. Like many child stars, there were adults in his life who weren’t exactly looking out for his best interests.

There wasn’t that much money in the Thompson house to begin with. “That first commercial when they paid me, it was like $800,” he says in Demi Lovato’s documentary Child Star, now streaming on Hulu. “I was 12, and it might as well have been a million dollars. You know how much candy I was thinking $800 was going to buy me?” 

That eventually led to more acting jobs, but they were infrequent enough to keep Thompson grounded. “It was almost like I was forced to stay humble, if you will, because when I could have been at my most boisterous, ‘everybody knows my name’ kind of years, I didn’t want that because I didn’t want people to know I was struggling,” he explains. “It’s kind of the beautiful conundrum, the irony of life.”

Eventually, Thompson became one of his generation’s most recognizable child stars thanks to starring roles in two Nickelodeon series. But he says labor laws in Florida, where he performed in shows like All That, weren’t well designed to protect child performers. You can guess the rest of the story.

“My mom met this dude somewhere through the community,” Thompson says. “Either like church or neighborhood shit, through a book club or something, who claimed to be a good kind of tax accountant, will get you out of your tax problems for the cheap.”

The community dude turned out to be a con artist, a fact that Thompson learned way too late. The man “ran away with my entire, my biggest earnings up until that point,” he says. “By the time that was discovered, that was toward the end of that Nickelodeon tenure and the end of the job-to-job existence I had up until that point, and it was devastating because I discovered it in front of others.”

Even worse? Thompson found out while he was trying to buy his first house. The man he thought was his accountant “didn’t show up with the fucking check,” Thompson remembers. “I’m with the real estate people at the office waiting to sign this paperwork, and he doesn’t bring the check.”  

That’s humiliation on top of financial devastation. “It’s crazy going from rags to riches and back to rags,” he says. “It’s a motherfucker.”