Rachel Bloom Says Red Carpet Style Is 'Getting Harder' (& Can Cost Up to $3,000!) Because She's Not a Size 0 or 2

Women in Hollywood have started openly discussing their salaries ever since the 2014 Sony email hack exposed the inequality between male and female actors’ earnings.

With that in mind, Rachel Bloom spoke frankly with Wealthsimple about about how much she makes as the creator and star of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend — and where that money goes. Bloom, 30, admits she grew up “very comfortably” in an “upper middle class” home in southern California and went on to attend New York University without taking out student loans. Though the actress worked to pay her rent (Broad City’s Ilana Glazer was her roommate in Brooklyn!), she graduated with “very little” in savings.

“I spent $3,000 dollars — the bulk of my savings — to make the video [for “F— Me Ray Bradbury],” Bloom tells Wealthsimple. “It’s had [more than 4 million] hits on YouTube, but I didn’t make it to make money … I made it because I wanted to be my own one-person sketch group. And that song has paid for itself back 30-times-fold.”

In fact, the YouTube video landed Bloom her first TV writing gig on Fox’s Allen Gregory, for which she was paid $3,500 per week.

“But I wasn’t taking all of that check home,” she recalls. “Remember that I was paying 10 percent to a manager, 10 percent to an agent and 5 percent to an entertainment lawyer.”

Once Allen Gregory got canceled, she took a string on non-union jobs with lower pay and credits her husband Dan Gregor — a writer on How I Met Your Mother at the time — for supporting her financially. “If it weren’t for the fact that we were living together there I probably wouldn’t have had the luxury of just being a writer and performer,” she admits.

FROM PEN: How Rachel Bloom’s Crazy Ex-Girlfriend Takes Musical Comedy to the Next Level

Since The CW picked up Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Bloom says she makes $50,000 to $60,000 for acting in an episode and spends very little while in production thanks to perks like free food. The studio will also pick up the tab on hair and makeup for work-related events, but when she’s on her own, the Golden Globe winner spends about $800 per gig and anywhere form $500 to $3,000 on non-sample-size designer dresses.

“A lot of fashion houses are reluctant to lend clothes that aren’t in the sample sizes of 0 and 2, so it’s getting harder and harder for me to find clothes without buying them,” Bloom shares. “That’s the whole problem with the fashion industry: my body size is literally normal and healthy but when you put me next to a model I look obese.”

As for where else her paychecks go, aside from paying her team, Bloom — who recently signed a book deal that gave her a “fantastic” advance — focuses on making her mortgage payments and splurges on “nice vacations.”

“We just went to French Polynesia and that was expensive,” she says. “I mean, we stayed at very nice places and flew business class, which I think was several thousand dollars. And that was really special.”

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend season 3 kicks off Oct. 13 at 8 p.m. ET on The CW.