WWE Star Reveals What Tough Enough Salary Were Like
A WWE superstar has given insight into how much they were paid on Tough Enough.
The WWE Tough Enough lineage goes back to 2001 when Maven Huffman and Nidia Guenard were the first winners. There have been several iterations of the show since then.
Three women were on the final Tough Enough season in 2015 and went on to have great success in pro wrestling. Mandy Rose and Sonya Deville didn’t win the show, but Rose had an eight-year run in the company while Deville has been a part of WWE for nearly a decade.
Chelsea Green was also a replacement in that season and she recently became the first Women’s United States Champion in WWE history.
Sonya Deville revealed to the Trading Secrets podcast that the contestants on Tough Enough were paid weekly while on the show.
“You get paid while you are on the show weekly. I don’t remember exactly what it was; I want to say $1,000 a week or something while you are there. Once you are gone, you’re gone.”
Sonya Deville Was Determined To Get WWE Job After Tough Enough
Following her appearance on Tough Enough, Sonya Deville did everything she could to get a job with the company.
“I flew home the day I got eliminated, and I went back to training wrestling the next day. I called WWE and asked, ‘Where can I train in professional wrestling in LA?’ They gave me a school. I went to the school, and that’s where I trained every single day while blowing up WWE’s email, ‘Hire me. Hire me.’
They told me as soon as I got eliminated that they were going to hire me, but I didn’t believe them. I was like, ‘I’m going to fly back home, I’m gonna go back to bartending and reality, and the dream is going to be over. The thing that I just fell in love with is going to be over.’
I was adamant about staying on top of learning how to wrestle and staying on top of them to hire me. Sure enough, three months later, I got the call.”
While there are no plans for the company to relaunch Tough Enough, a new show called WWE LFG is set to debut on A&E at some point in 2025 although there are not a lot of details about it yet. The show will feature athletes trying to make it to WWE while under the guidance of some WWE legends like The Undertaker, Booker T, Bubba Ray Dudley, Mickie James, and others.