Who’s the Boss star reveals he’s working as an Amazon delivery driver
Danny Pintauro has opened up about the challenges of being a working actor, saying he has become an Amazon driver to maintain a sustainable income in Los Angeles.
The actor rose to fame as a child star in the Eighties, portraying Jonathan Bower on the sitcom Who’s the Boss? for all eight seasons, alongside Tony Danza, Judith Light and Alyssa Milano. Since then, he has landed several small TV and film roles.
However, the instability of life as an actor led the 50-year-old to pursue various side jobs to make ends meet, including as an Amazon driver. Pintauro said he was “surprised” when an Instagram photo he posted of himself in his car while delivering packages for the online retailer went viral.
“The reason that people are so fascinated is because they don’t understand that we’re just as poor as the rest of you. Unless you’re in the top one percent of actors,” he said during a new interview with Entertainment Tonight.
When asked how often he was working for Amazon, Pintauro responded: “Recently, I haven’t been doing it as much because my other side job is actually taking off. I have a booth at a fair, here in Long Beach, [California]. I will be selling book nooks.
“I’ve sold over 155 of them since November 2024,” the actor — who makes the creative bookshelf displays himself and has his own shop, Wandering Book Nook — said. “But I am still doing Amazon, only once a week or so.”
Pintauro said that when Amazon acquired the streaming rights to all eight seasons of Who’s the Boss? last year, he got a check for only $4,000. “I definitely make more money working for Amazon than I do selling the show to Amazon,” he added. “That’s crazy to say.”
Still, the Amazon job comes with its own set of challenges. Pintauro told Yahoo last month that delivering packages to apartments is “the worst” because it’s hard to find the right entrance to the building or the mailroom.
“I’ve definitely delivered my fair share of packages to the wrong place,” the Cujo star said. “But you get docked for that. Eventually, if you make enough mistakes, you don’t get the same caliber of shifts.”
During an interview with Fox News Digital earlier this week, he hit back at the assumptions made about his acting career after his early success.
“People always assume that if they recognize you, you must be financially set for life, and that’s just not how it works,” he explained. “There’s this very inflated idea of what residuals — especially residuals from that era, from the Eighties — look like.
“We were working on a television model. DVD compilations didn’t exist, so there’s nothing in the contract to stipulate what to do if that should come up. Reruns and syndication were barely a thing, so the contracts were just not conducive to residuals.”
Pintauro continued: “When a network purchases the series, I get some money from the purchase, but I get less money every time it gets purchased. Season one, for instance, has been purchased so many times by every network where it airs that I’m getting five to six cents per episode, and then they can air it as many times as they want.”
