"Who's the Boss?" Actor Danny Pintauro Earns More From Amazon Deliveries Than Streaming Residuals
Danny Pintauro spent eight seasons as Jonathan Bower on Who's the Boss? — one of ABC's most beloved sitcoms of the 1980s. Forty years later, he's delivering packages for Amazon Flex. And he wants everyone to know that's perfectly fine.
Pintauro, 50, went public with his side gig in April after posting a photo on Instagram of himself behind the wheel of his car, packages stacked in the backseat. "Working hard while 'not working,'" he wrote. "The entertainment business has been soooo slow, so I've been doing what a lot of people do — figuring it out, showing up, and taking the work that's there while I keep building the work I really want. 38 packages today! There's no shame in staying in motion."
The post went viral — and the conversation it sparked turned out to be bigger than the Instagram moment itself.
The Residuals Reality
Pintauro spoke to TODAY and Entertainment Weekly about the financial realities behind the decision, and his explanation cuts to the core of something the entertainment industry rarely talks about openly.
Who's the Boss? ran on ABC from 1984 to 1992 — before the era of DVD sales, streaming residuals, or contract language that anticipated those revenue streams. The show is now available on Amazon Prime Video. Pintauro is earning residuals from that streaming deal. Just not nearly enough to live on.
"I definitely make more money working for Amazon than I do selling the show to Amazon — that's crazy to say," he told Entertainment Tonight. "A really good year [of residuals] can bring me about $9,000. That's nothing in this day and age with the prices of everything."
The Life He Built After the Show
What Pintauro did after Who's the Boss? ended in 1992 is a story that has unfolded publicly over the course of decades — and not always on his own terms.
He left the entertainment industry, attended Stanford University, and graduated in 1998. But the years that followed were difficult in ways that went far beyond career uncertainty. In 1997, a reporter from the National Enquirer told him the tabloid was planning to out him as gay — with or without his consent. He came out publicly rather than have the story taken from him, but the experience left a lasting mark on how he thought about privacy, identity, and control over his own narrative.
In the early 2000s, Pintauro struggled with crystal meth addiction — a crisis he has spoken about openly, including in a candid 2015 interview with Oprah Winfrey on Oprah: Where Are They Now? During that same interview, he revealed that he had been HIV-positive since 2003, having kept the diagnosis private for 12 years. He had discovered it during a routine checkup while living in New York.
"I wanted to tell you this a long time ago, but I wasn't ready — I'm ready now — that I'm HIV positive, and I have been for 12 years," he told Winfrey. He described his initial reaction as a complicated mix of fear and, unexpectedly, relief. "You've spent so much time terrified that you're going to get it, and then you have it, and you don't have to be terrified anymore."
He went public with the diagnosis hoping to serve as a role model — the beacon of light he felt he hadn't been able to be when he was outed a decade earlier. He has been open about his recovery from addiction ever since.
In 2014, Pintauro married his husband Wil Tabares in a beachfront ceremony in Dana Point, California. The couple later relocated to Austin, Texas, where Pintauro worked as a veterinary technician before returning to California in 2022 to pursue acting again.
The Industry That Shrank
The residuals problem is one side of the equation. The other is a Hollywood that has dramatically contracted since Pintauro returned to acting.
"Returning to acting after a ten-year break is an uphill battle," he said. "I'm reintroducing myself as an adult actor in an industry that looks very different than it once did."
The numbers back that up. Film LA reported 18,560 shoot days in Los Angeles in 2021. By 2024 that number had fallen to just 7,716 — a drop of nearly 60 percent. Pilot season, once a reliable annual pipeline for working actors, has become a fraction of what it was. One network recently ordered just eight pilots — a figure Pintauro cited as evidence of how severely the market has tightened.
"Unless you're in the top one percent of actors, acting is a gig," he said. "So you're constantly going for the next one, especially with stars from shows from the past."
Why Amazon Flex Specifically
Pintauro said the choice of Amazon Flex wasn't random. The job's flexible scheduling allows him to keep auditioning while still earning income — a combination that most side gigs don't offer. It also gives him a level of anonymity that more public-facing service work wouldn't.
"I take a picture and walk away," he said, noting that most people don't recognize him on his delivery routes. "No one sees me."
"The concept that our residuals are not enough to survive on does not seem to get through people's brains," he said. "And so when they see us surviving by working at Trader Joe's or Amazon, it's confusing, because it's like, 'Oh, he must be set for life from all those Who's the Boss? residuals.' And it's just not true. So it makes us look like regular people, which we actually are."
What He Wants People to Take From It
Pintauro framed the whole conversation not as a cautionary tale but as a straightforward account of what it actually looks like to be a working actor in 2026 — including the parts nobody talks about.
"There's no shame in staying in motion," he said. It's the same line he put on Instagram. He meant it then and he means it now.
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