Star Nollywood actress Bimbo Akintola is speaking about the heavily talked about topic of celebrity earnings vs the lifestyles they portray on social media.
This is a discourse that has been happening for years now, and during a new interview, Bimbo Akintola also raised her own questions about the lifestyle after exposing the realities of what major names like IrokoTV and Africa Magic pay for their movies. Here’s everything Bimbo Akintola said.
Speaking about how the lifestyle that actresses portray on social media don’t match up with the realistic realities of being an actress in Nollywood, Bimbo Akintola said:
BIMBO AKINTOLA: For a lot of actresses, people can’t understand where the money is coming from. Cuz we all know what the industry is about. We all know what people earn. We all know what you can earn. Except you have money from home, maybe you’re from a rich family, then some of the lifestyle we see especially on social media can be real. And if it’s real, where is it from?
Being truthful, people come up to me and they say “look at actresses, they’re very rich” and I say I don’t know about that because me, I’m not rich. I say “when you see them, ask them what they do.” I say it all the time. I say “ask them what they do.” Because we all know how much them dey sell film na. Iroko, has Iroko passed 4 million? Is it not 4 million naira, or 5 max? That’s how much a whole film is na. No be so? We all know how much e dey sell for Africa Magic, Africa Magic just went back to N4 million. They went down to 1.2, a whole film! All of us inside plus crew plus everybody, we know how much it is. And then yes, there is also Netflix and Netflix is international so obviously, the money is also bigger. But we also know what people earn for cinema films. We started with cinema before Netflix and that boosted people, but we also know how much we make for those films.
So, for a lot of actresses that I see, I don’t know if the money is from home, maybe they’re from very rich homes. Or there’s other businesses that they’re doing. Because there has to be with the amount of wealth that some of our colleagues show.
And then of course we’ve also heard stories of actresses being wanted by politicians, actresses dating politicians, actresses doing stuff with politicians and getting paid for it. So we’ve all heard that, and we all know that things like that do happen. But it’s not just actresses that do that, women in Nigeria do that, because the poverty level is pretty high, isn’t it? So a lot of women are on the level of whatever I can do to sustain myself and my family, I’m gonna do it.