Even Stevens star Christy Carlson Romano says she earned half of co-star Shia LaBeouf’s pay, a gap her mother tried to fix while their household depended on the teen actress.
Romano, now 42, went public this month with a blunt claim about her Disney Channel years: as the female lead opposite LaBeouf, she took home half his episode rate even though they shared the screen as co-leads.
She tied the revelation to her new memoir and an old family letter that laid the numbers bare. The point was not a Hollywood score-settling tour. It was a grown woman describing a business that priced a teenage girl at half, while that same paycheck kept a household afloat.
Page Six reported the details after Romano posted on Instagram on Oct. 9, days after her book landed.
Even Stevens ran three seasons on Disney Channel from 2000 to 2003. Romano played Ren Stevens. LaBeouf, now 40, played her brother Louis.
While writing the memoir, Romano dug through old photos and letters. She found a 2000 note her mother, Sharon, sent to her agent. The letter did not say much.
Sharon wrote:
“Christy wants what Shia is getting,”
And:
“As much as we love the show, it has to be worth her while.”
The letter showed LaBeouf earning $12,000 per episode. Romano made $6,000. Romano said her mother was asking for equal pay and admitting the family was deep in debt.
On Instagram she put it plainly:
“I was a kid and the female lead on ‘Even Stevens.’ I was paid half of what Shia was paid; we were co-leads and had the same screen time,”
She added that by then her paycheck was keeping the family afloat. Her mother was fighting for her and for a household that depended on a teenage girl.
The book, Once Upon a Trainwreck: The Rise and Fall of a Child Star, was released Oct. 6. Romano cast the pay story as one piece of a larger pattern: a child carrying adult weight inside an industry that set her price lower.
She told readers the memoir is not a takedown of famous names. LaBeouf “earned every dollar,” she wrote. Other recognizable people “were part of my story. They were never the story.”
The story, in her words, is “a girl who grew up too fast and a business that decided she was worth half.” She addressed readers who know that load firsthand: if you grew up taking care of the people who were supposed to take care of you, she wrote the book for you.
Romano also starred as the voice of Kim Possible and appeared in Cadet Kelly. Those credits made her a familiar face to a generation of Disney Channel kids. The pay letter shows how little that visibility guaranteed at the negotiating table when she was still a teen.
In a 2021 YouTube video, Romano described watching LaBeouf’s later rise. They went from seeing each other every day to years apart, then to him becoming a huge star. For a while, she said, the gap between who he had been and who he became was frustrating. She has said she was once a bit salty about his success and felt regret over choosing college while he made a big splash in Hollywood.
After his arrest in New Orleans in February, she posted an Instagram video with a short line about people asking about her old co-star after she had stopped inserting herself into that story. The pay disparity remains the sharper document from her own archive: same show, same screen time, half the rate, and a mother trying to renegotiate while debt piled up at home.
Hollywood loves speeches about fairness. The paper trail from a 2000 kids’ sitcom still reads like a contract that valued one co-lead at twice the other, and left a teenager holding up a family.
