Not needing business from one of his ‘friends’, The Inbetweener’s Jay Cartwright actor is making serious dough from his Cameo hustle.
He opens up about the ‘financial godsend’ while chatting on Made in Chelsea’s Spencer Matthews’ podcast Big Fish.
James Buckley played Jay in the E4 sitcom in the late noughties – obviously plus The Inbetweeners movies that followed in 2011 and 2014.
And even though it’s been over 10 years since his character walked the school halls with Neil, Simon and Will, people are still just as obsessed.
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So obsessed that they’ve funded Buckley to become a Cameo millionaire with his popular video requests.
Praising him for ‘killing it’, Matthews calls the 35-year-old a ‘hit’ on the video site, where fans can pay for personalised videos from their favourite stars, including the likes of The Office’s Brian Baumgartner, Tiger King’s Carole Baskin and Lindsay Lohan.
Buckley reveals he started making Cameos during lockdown because he ‘needed something to do’ with his time and needed to ‘bring in some money’.
He also calls Covid a ‘sledgehammer’ for the projects he previously had lined up.
Unsurprisingly, he makes the videos as his legendary The Inbetweeners character ‘because that’s what people want’.
“Jay’s way more interesting and way more funny than me,” the actor said.
He also admits a ‘big chunk’ of his income comes from the personalised videos for fans.
“It was a godsend financially. But I never wanted to take the p*ss, again I’m in the business of making people happy – I don’t want to rip people off, I charge 40 quid.
“Two mates can go in 20 quid each for their other mate down the pub and I call him a bus w**ker and take the p*ss out of him and it makes a lot of people happy.”
Despite now being one of, ‘if not the most’ requested people on Cameo, Buckley wasn’t so confident in the site when it was first suggested to him.
He worried it would send him to ‘dark places’ as he revealed he didn’t believe people would want a video from him.
But now he says: “I have done 10s of thousands. 10s and 10s of thousands, maybe 30, 40,000 something like that.”
And although he is ‘more lax on it now’ than he was during lockdown, Buckley still makes videos for fans ‘every single day’.
“You’re a Cameo millionaire?” Matthews asks. And with a humble confidence, Buckley admits: “Yeah, Yeah I am.”
Topics: The Inbetweeners, TV and Film, James Buckley, Celebrity
Jess Battison