Former Blue’s Clues star Steve Burns claimed that he made very little money hosting the classic Nickelodeon show.
“I got Blue’s Clues early [in my career], but every waiter I ever knew made more money than I did for the first many seasons of that show,” Burns, 51, revealed on the Thursday, May 1, episode of the “Soul Boom” podcast. “But I was really fortunate, because Blue’s Clues was my side hustle forever. My real gig was, I was a voiceover guy. I fell into that early.”
Burns looked back on the start of his career in New York City in the early 1990s, where he dreamed of being “an unknown actor who did Off-Broadway stuff or to be Al Pacino.” In reality, Burns got his big break with Nickelodeon after supporting himself with commercial voiceover work, a gig he found “grim.”
The actor said he landed his life-changing Nickelodeon job “entirely by accident” when he got the wrong impression about an early audition. At the time, Burns was only taking “serious actor auditions” for shows like Homicide: Life on the Street and Law & Order.
The actor said, “One day I had an audition for what I thought was going to be the voice of a cartoon on a children’s television show. And if I had known that it was going to be ‘the guy on the show,’ on camera, I wouldn’t have gone. Not only because I was a pretentious young man at the time — that was part of it — but also because children’s television had never occurred to me.”
“I thought it was a voice thing. I went to the audition,” Burns went on. “And when I got there, there was a camera in the room. And I thought, ‘Oh, s***. I better do something.’ Yeah. And so I looked at the script, and, you know, I figured … I’m gonna act the s*** out of this.”
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Burns recalled that his approach to win over Blue’s Clues producers was by standing as close to the camera as possible, thereby creating an intimacy with the audience. Of course, Burns landed the Blue’s Clues job and spent six years playing a fictionalized version of himself on the Nickelodeon series. He received a Daytime Emmy Award nomination in 2001.
After leaving Blue’s Clues, Burns focused on voice-over work for brands like Snickers, KFC and McDonald’s. A strange internet subculture developed around Burns’s disappearance from the public eye in the early 2000s, including death hoaxes claiming he had a fatal drug overdose or was killed in an accident. In actuality, Burns stepped away from the limelight to focus on his mental health.
The actor and TV host first disclosed in 2022 that he’d been diagnosed with clinical depression prior to leaving Blue’s Clues. Burns explained on the “Soul Boom” podcast that the death hoaxes made him feel as if his “continued existence was an inconvenient truth.”
“[It] was something I would hear from people. ‘Oh, I thought you were dead. Didn’t you die?’ And when it persists for 10 years, it feels like a cultural preference … you start to feel like you’re supposed to be [dead],” he recalled.
Burns went on, “I was in, kind of, the throes of this depression after I left the show. But what a lot of people don’t understand is that during the show, the internet was beginning to internet and the world decided, or a large portion of the world decided, that I had died.”
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The death hoax was particularly hurtful, Burns said, because some of his family members actually believed he’d died.
“I built a house in Brooklyn and never left it. I call it ‘the gray’ of my life,” Burns said. “It was about 10 years where I did nothing but, like, drink couple of bottles of wine every night alone, watch MythBusters. … And just eat Pad Thai.”
Burns added, “I gained, like, 50 pounds. I was completely unrecognizable. I didn’t recognize me. And everyone thought I was dead. And eventually I started playing along. You know, that was the strategy. Was just … maybe I am [dead].”
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Later in the interview, Burns clarified that he turned his life around once he started seeing a therapist to deal with his depression. Burns has since made a TV comeback by writing several episodes of Nickelodeon’s revival of Blue’s Clues (now titled Blue’s Clues & You!), in addition to reprising his on-camera role alongside new host Josh Dela Cruz.
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