What's 'Beaver Cleaver' Actor Jerry Mathers' Net Worth?

For actor Jerry Mathers, known worldwide as Beaver Cleaver from the 1950s and early ’60s family comedy Leave It to Beaver, the role that put him on the map is the gift that keeps on giving.

Debuting as Beaver at the age of 9, Mathers is not that former child star who resents the part that made him famous. He’s practically an ambassador for the Leave It to Beaver brand.

Here’s Mathers’ net worth today.

Mathers began working at age 2

The actor began modeling at the age of 2. Eventually, he told the Television Academy Foundation, he gained more and more notice and began acting on the live television programs popular at the start of the medium in the 1950s.

“I was doing a show called Lux Video Theater, which actually wasn’t a variety show; it was more drama,” he said. “And at that time, even the commercials were live. I had done some movies before that, like the one with my sister, This Is My Love, and a few other small parts, but no big parts in a movie.”

By age 7, he appeared in the Alfred Hitchcock film The Trouble With Harry. Years later, Mathers said, Hitchcock would stop by to see him on the Universal/Beaver set when the director was working on his The Alfred Hitchcock Presents program.

Mathers was and always will be Beaver Cleaver

In 1957, Mathers was 9 and was hired to play Beaver on the situation comedy. He went to his audition dressed in his Cub Scout uniform, eager to get to his scout meeting. The audition was in its final stages, with the producers interviewing the last ten candidates for the role of Beaver. For Mathers, the wait was eternal.

“I was the very last one,” Mathers recalled. “So I come in and I was just really jittery. The producers knew me because they’d interviewed me over six to eight weeks.

“They looked at me and said, ‘Jerry, what’s wrong? You’re so jittery today. Don’t you want to be here?’ I said, ‘No, I want to go to my Cub Scout meeting.’ They said, “OK, you can go.’”

His honesty was refreshing at his audition. That evening, his mother received the call that he’d been cast as Beaver: “And the reason I got the job is because they said they would rather have a kid who wanted to go to a Cub Scout meeting than a kid who wanted to be an actor.”

After ‘Leave It to Beaver’ for Mathers

Mathers today attends classic television/nostalgia conventions and appears on networks dedicated to shows like Beaver to continue promoting the beloved comedy. His net worth is $3 million.

Once Leave It to Beaver ended, the actor attended a regular high school, eager to be with young people his own age. By 1967, he graduated and then joined the National Guard.

“After I finished my military commitment, I ended up going to University of California, Berkeley. I have a degree in philosophy from there. I put myself through school with the money I made from Leave It to Beaver.”

The actor had wisely invested his income from the show, explaining that he lived “off the interest. I got a sum of money and I was investing it every 60 to 90 days in basically treasury bills and commercial paper.”

Once he graduated, he worked in bank management, moved on to real estate, and also continued working intermittently on various television series.

In the 1980s, the remaining cast members of Leave It to Beaver reunited in the reunion series, The New Leave It to Beaver, which ran for four seasons.

Ever the entrepreneur, Mathers owned and operated a successful catering company in the 1990s. His love for performance remained, as evidenced by his appearance on the Broadway stage in 2007 as Wilbur Turnblad in Hairspray.

“Leave It to Beaver made me world famous, basically monetarily set me up for life,” he told the Television Academy Foundation. “I cannot walk out onto the street without people coming up to me. Anyplace I go, not only in this country but anyplace in the world, I have friends.”

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