Featured Image Credit: Paul Archuleta/Getty Images / Instagram/dreadematteo
Topics: Celebrity, Film and TV, Health, Hollywood, Money, OnlyFans, Drea de Matteo
Emily Brown
Topics: Celebrity, Film and TV, Health, Hollywood, Money, OnlyFans, Drea de Matteo
Former Sopranos star Drea De Matteo has revealed she earns 'way more' on OnlyFans than she ever did on the hit TV show.
Now 52-years-old, De Matteo was in her late twenties when she landed the role of Adriana La Cerva, starring opposite the likes of James Gandolfini and Michael Imperioli in The Sopranos.
The actor stayed in the job until 2006 before moving on to appear in titles including Desperate Housewives and Sons of Anarchy, but almost 20 years later the role of La Cerva remains to be one of her best-known.
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But despite being a career-defining job, it turns out The Sopranos didn't earn De Matteo the big bucks - not in the same way OnlyFans does.
De Matteo turned to the subscription-based site to help make ends meet during the Covid-19 pandemic, when she began to lose out on work due to her decision not to get the vaccine.
She's now spoken about her work in an interview with ABC News, recalling: "At that time during the mandate, I couldn’t even work at a bookstore, I needed a vaccine card, I needed a barcode to survive.”
With few other options, and on the brink of losing her home in Hollywood, De Matteo turned to OnlyFans and was surprised to see how quickly her page took off.
“That was a fluke, a really lucky fluke and if I had to do it all over again, I would have done it sooner," she said.
“I don’t care what any of these haters want to say. I put a picture up, a selfie, and holy cow. OK, we just paid the real estate company back within a day.
“And immediately I was like ‘Oh my God, we’re going to be OK'."
When asked how her earnings through OnlyFans compared to her work on The Sopranos, De Matteo pointed out she was 'never a top tier player' on the show.
As a result, she said she gets 'way more on OnlyFans' - though she admitted it 'depends on the month'.
"I’ve only been doing it a couple of months," she said.
"People can speculate, it’s really not as much as everyone thinks," De Matteo continued. "I’m still not rich by any means, considering what rich looks like today, but we’re OK and we’ll survive and I need to figure out other ways to maintain my home.
“I know it is a career for some women, that was a bandaid, OnlyFans was a bandaid for me.”
As well as her OnlyFans career, de Matteo runs a clothing line called Ultrafree.