Andrew Keegan, 47, said on On The McBride Rewind that he still receives one-cent residual checks for some of his earlier work and that it costs about 40 cents to send them.
Keegan framed the moment plainly: "I think it’s really funny because I’ll get different [amounts for different] shows, obviously, but I’ll get 1 cent checks, and it costs like 40 cents to send," he said, before adding, "One cent is not worth my time." Those tiny payments sit alongside other residuals he described as ranging from $10 up to $80: "There are still residuals that come from all those shows, like $10, $20, $50, $80."
The numbers matter because they expose how the economics of past television and film work still trickle into an actor’s bank account in wildly uneven amounts. Keegan singled out a clear outlier: "I think ’10 Things’ is the biggest residuals," he said, naming the 1999 romantic comedy that made him best known to audiences.
Keegan’s comments point to a career built across the 1990s and 2000s. His timeline of credits in the conversation mirrors the residuals he described: a role in Independence Day in 1996; appearances on Party of Five from 1997 to 1998 and 7th Heaven from 1997 to 2002; the breakout 10 Things I Hate About You in 1999; The Broken Hearts Club in 2000; the series Related from 2005 to 2006; and a turn on CSI: New York in 2010. He said the small checks come from the movies and TV shows he appeared in earlier in his career.
The gap between cents and tens highlights a friction in how residuals play out. On the one hand, Keegan is still collecting nominal sums that are literally cheaper to send than their face value. On the other, some of his past work continues to produce checks that, while modest, are more meaningful — $10, $20, $50 and $80. That mix undercuts any tidy narrative about residuals being uniformly lucrative or negligible.
Keegan’s blunt appraisal cuts through the peculiarity: the one-cent payments are effectively symbolic, and he said as much — "One cent is not worth my time." At the same time he acknowledged that not all residuals are purely token; the 1999 film that remains his signature credit supplies the bulk of what he called his largest residuals.
What this means going forward is simple and specific: Keegan will continue to get a scatter of residual checks that run from effectively worthless to modestly useful, and his biggest ongoing income from past work is tied to 10 Things I Hate About You. The tiny, frequent one-cent checks are a theatrical oddity that underline how residual systems can produce both absurd and practical outcomes, and Keegan’s bottom-line judgment is unambiguous — "One cent is not worth my time."
