He starred as George Washington in the smash hit Broadway show “Hamilton,” and now is part of Ana DuVernay’s highly acclaimed Netflix film series, “When They See Us” — two powerful, meaningful projects for an actor who grew up in Baltimore never imagining that he could make a living as an artist.
“When I first started getting paychecks [from Hamilton], I was still in panic mode,” Clark told Jen Rogers on Yahoo Finance’s latest episode of My Three Cents. “I realized that trauma, those triggers were coming from childhood. I would look at the check and I wouldn't think, ‘How can I invest this? How can I save this?’ I would think to myself, ‘How many months of rent is this? How many months of my overhead does this cover?’ And so everything was looked at from the perspective of survive, survive, survive, survive, survive.”
Clark — who was in Hamilton for almost two years — says it took a full year to stop panicking every time he got a paycheck and to start feeling a sense of financial security. “Hamilton kind of changed my life from a financial perspective, as an artist,” he said. “It was the first time I had to not look at a paycheck as an artist from a space of survival. It was about, ‘What can this money do? How do we plan with what I'm being given? How can I be a good steward over the supply that's coming in?’”
Clark says that his financial ‘supply’ is much less predictable now that he’s transitioned from a regular Broadway paycheck to short-term projects like his current role in “When They See Us” and an upcoming turn in “Queen Sugar” on OWN. And so, just as he’d hire a trainer to bulk up for a role, he now leans on an accountant and financial advisor to guide him with money.
“It's about setting yourself up so that there's a plan. And I think that that's the biggest thing that I had to learn,” he says. “As an artist, depending on the job that you have, your finances change. And so you have to kind of govern yourself accordingly,” he said.
Even today, a proud homeowner with money in the bank, Clark still battles the fear of going broke. So, when faced with a financial setback — such as a recent tax bill that was much higher than expected — he takes a deep breath and asks himself two questions: “Am I going to die? Am I going to jail?” he says laughing. “If you're not going to go to jail, you're not going to die, you're going to make it through this. Come up with a plan and then get people to help you execute the plan. That's all you need to do.”
My Three Cents with Jen Rogers is a weekly interview series that explores celebrities’ history with — and relationship to — money. Find it exclusively on Yahoo Finance.