For Jessie Cave, a career spanning the Harry Potter films, Call the Midwife and Black Mirror has proved less financially rewarding than an unexpected venture on OnlyFans.
The actor, who played Lavender Brown in the Harry Potter franchise, said she had earned more from the subscription platform in a year than during almost two decades as a professional actor.
Cave launched her account in 2025, offering videos centred on her long hair rather than sexually explicit material. In an interview with The Times, she said she had made £15,000 in a single day.
“I’ve earned more, easily, than my entire acting career within one year,” she said.
The 39-year-old, who has four children, initially expected the account to provide short-term financial breathing space. Instead, she said the income had become vital to her family.
“I thought I’d make five grand, be on it for a few months and it would buy me time to work out what we’re going to do,” she said. “But it’s now been over a year and a half, and it’s genuinely saved our lives.”
Cave has previously written about feeling a “sense of shame” after joining the service. Her experience highlights how some public figures have turned to direct-to-fan platforms as traditional entertainment work becomes less predictable.
OnlyFans permits creators to charge subscribers for a range of material, including adult content, private updates, fitness posts, photographs and behind-the-scenes footage. The company’s stated business model gives creators 80 per cent of payments made by fans, with the remainder retained by the platform.
Iggy Azalea
Australian rapper Iggy Azalea joined OnlyFans in 2023, two years after announcing her retirement from music.
She became one of the platform’s most successful creators, charging subscribers 25 US dollars a month for access to photographs, videos, illustrations, poetry and music.
Azalea later rejected reports that she had earned 48 million US dollars through the site, although she confirmed that the sum was substantial.
“It’s not $48 million. That’s not the exact number, but it’s a life-changing number,” she told ABC News in the US.
She said the income enabled her to fund business ideas, adding that she had been able to “seed out” projects she wanted to build.
Azalea closed her account in 2024. She has since focused on other ventures, including Unreal Mobile, a wireless provider she co-founded, and the cryptocurrency $MOTHER.
Denise Richards
American actor Denise Richards joined the platform in June 2022, initially in support of her daughter, Sami Sheen.
Sami Sheen had faced criticism online over her decision to create her own OnlyFans account. Richards said she was angered by the reaction and wanted to challenge the judgement directed at her daughter.
“When I saw that she was getting backlash for owning her sexuality and doing what she wanted to do, it upset me as a mum and also as a woman in business,” Richards previously told People magazine.
Richards did not reveal how much money she had made, but said the account had become “quite lucrative”.
Her career has included film and television roles, as well as modelling and reality television work. Her decision to join also demonstrated how the platform can be used by established entertainers to control their relationship with their audience and generate income outside conventional contracts.
Lily Allen
Lily Allen approached OnlyFans from a different direction. The British singer began posting on the platform in 2024 after learning that her feet had received a five-star rating on WikiFeet, a website where users share and rate photographs of celebrities’ feet.
Speaking on the Miss Me? podcast, Allen said she had decided to test the idea and began uploading photographs with humorous captions, including “La Dolce Feeta”.
She later said managing the account was less demanding than touring and brought in more money than the royalties she received from Spotify.
Allen closed the page in 2025. She said the decision followed her separation from Stranger Things actor David Harbour and that the project had “wasn’t that fun anymore”.
“It’s not really that interesting. I started it just over a year ago,” she said. “I was quite active in the beginning but, when I broke up with David, it just wasn’t that fun anymore.”
The different approaches taken by Cave, Azalea, Richards and Allen underline the breadth of content now sold through OnlyFans. For some, it is a way to offer exclusive creative work; for others, it provides a new source of income when acting, music or touring no longer offers the same financial security.