Jason Bateman Dishes on His ‘Complicated’ Relationship With Money After Growing Up as a Child Actor

Jason Bateman opened up about the “interesting” relationship he has with money after growing up as a child actor and finding fame again as an adult.

The Arrested Development alum, 57, appeared on the Thursday, June 18 episode of Vulture’s Good One podcast, where he was asked a very blunt question by host Jesse David Fox about his income and net worth.

Bateman explained that some of his earliest memories in show business on Little House on the Prairie involved being very aware of his family’s cash flow and his role in it.

“It is an interesting subject for me personally only because I had a complicated relationship with it growing up because both my parents were my managers,” Bateman — who was 11 years old when he began filming the Western series — explained. “What I made was very helpful to our bottom line each month and so there was a great deal of pressure to kind of, you know, like, don’t get fired.”

He revealed that adding school to the mix didn’t help the situation. Not only did it add an extra level of work, but poor grades could have cost him and his family some serious income.

“If you don’t keep a C average in school, you don’t get your work permit and you’re fired,” Bateman explained. “And it’s every six months that work permit needs to get renewed. And the television season is nine months and I was doing TV every year. And so it was rough.”

The Ozark star noted that, although the situation growing up as a child actor was “anxiety-inducing,” it also gave him a unique confidence in his ability to make money whenever he needed to. Bateman explained that he has friends who inherited a lot of wealth from their family, but they don’t spend money like he does because they never learned how to generate more.

“They’re the tightest people I’ve known, because they didn’t make that money and so they feel every dollar out, they’re not going to be able to get back,” he said.

Specifically, Bateman said this confidence helped him during the ten-year period when he was no longer a child actor and before he got his second big break in Hollywood as Michael Bluth on Arrested Development.