This is nothing to sing about.
“Blue’s Clues” star Steve Burns made a surprising admission about his time working on the beloved children’s show.
On Thursday’s episode of actor Rainn Wilson’s “Soul Boom” podcast, Burns revealed that waiters “made more money” than he did while hosting the Nickelodeon hit.
“I got ‘Blue’s Clues’ early, but every waiter I ever knew made more money than I did for the first many seasons of that show,” the 51-year-old actor said. “But I was really fortunate, because ‘Blue’s Clues’ was my side hustle forever.”
“My real gig was, I was a voiceover guy,” he added. “I fell into that early.”
Burns started his acting career in New York City in the early 1990s. While he told Wilson that he initially dreamed of being either “an unknown actor who did Off-Broadway stuff” or “Al Pacino,” he ultimately landed the gig as the host of “Blue’s Clues” in 1996.
But the Nickelodeon job of a lifetime happened “entirely by accident” because he originally thought he was auditioning for just another voiceover project.
“One day, I had an audition for what I thought was going to be the voice of a cartoon on a children’s television show. And if I had known that it was going to be ‘the guy on the show,’ on camera, I wouldn’t have gone,” he explained. “Not only because I was a pretentious young man at the time – that was part of it – but also because children’s television had never occurred to me.”
Burns continued, “I thought it was a voice thing. I went to the audition. And when I got there, there was a camera in the room. And I thought, ‘Oh, s–t. I better do something.’ Yeah. And so I looked at the script, and, you know, I figured … I’m gonna act the s–t out of this.”
The “Blue’s Clues” star remained on the popular kids’ show until 2002, when he left to focus on his mental health. However, rumors soon spread that he had reportedly died.
It wasn’t until 20 years later, in 2022, that Burns announced he had been diagnosed with clinical depression shortly before departing the series.
“It was something I would hear from people. ‘Oh, I thought you were dead. Didn’t you die?’ And when it persists for 10 years, it feels like a cultural preference, and you start to feel like you’re supposed to be,” he admitted to Wilson.
“I was in, kind of, the throes of this depression after I left the show,” Burns continued. “But what a lot of people don’t understand is that during the show, the internet was beginning to internet and the world decided, or a large portion of the world decided, that I had died.”
Although Burns remained in NYC after leaving “Blue’s Clues,” he said that there “was about 10 years” where he “did nothing” with himself.
“I built a house in Brooklyn and never left it. I call it ‘the gray’ of my life,” he said. “It was about 10 years where I did nothing but, like, drink a couple of bottles of wine every night alone, watch ‘MythBusters’ and just eat Pad Thai.”
“I gained, like, 50 pounds. I was completely unrecognizable. I didn’t recognize myself. And everyone thought I was dead,” Burns continued. “And eventually, I started playing along. You know, that was the strategy. Was just, maybe I am.”
Burns ultimately got himself back on track, and he has since returned to Nickelodeon to write for and make a cameo in the “Blue’s Clues” revival, “Blue’s Clues & You!”
He also took to TikTok in March 2024 to “check in” on the audience that grew up watching him more than 20 years earlier.
“Hey, I’m checking in,” he said in the moving clip at the time. “What’s going on?”
