Mae Pearl Martin was born on 2 May 1987 in Toronto to Wendy Martin, a Canadian writer and teacher, and James Chatto, an English actor and musician who became a food writer. Performance ran through the family: their grandfather Tom Chatto was an actor, and their uncle Daniel Chatto acted before turning to paint.

Martin came out as non-binary in 2021 and uses they and them. They grew up in Toronto with one older brother and left an all-girls school at fifteen to work in comedy full time, a decision that makes their earnings history unusually long for someone of their age.

They began performing at thirteen with a Toronto troupe called the Young and the Useless, then worked the box office at the Second City club in the city while doing stand-up in its rooms. At sixteen they became the youngest person ever nominated for the Tim Sims Encouragement Fund Award, Canada’s prize for emerging comics.

In 2011 they moved to London and spent most of a decade on the British circuit. A working club and festival comic at that level earns £20,000 to £60,000 a year from gigs, support slots and corporate work, which across nine years puts their pre-television stand-up income at £250,000 to £500,000, or $320,000 to $640,000 on our estimate.

Two things turned them from a circuit act into a name. The first was Edinburgh: their 2015 show Us and then Dope in 2017, which was shortlisted for the Edinburgh Comedy Award and became a Netflix special. Around them sat a BBC Radio 4 series, Mae Martin’s Guide to 21st Century Sexuality, in 2016, and a book of the same subject in 2019.

The second was Feel Good, the Channel 4 and Netflix comedy they co-created and co-wrote with Joe Hampson and led across twelve episodes in 2020 and 2021. For a writer who is also the star, the money arrives in three parts: scripts at £12,000 to £20,000 an episode shared with a co-writer, an acting fee of £8,000 to £15,000 an episode, and a creator’s share of the format. On our estimate the two series paid them $400,000 to $900,000 in total.

The awards followed immediately. the Royal Television Society gave Martin and Hampson its Writer — Comedy prize in 2021, and at the same ceremony Martin took the Breakthrough Award; Objective Fiction recorded both. The same year brought a BAFTA nomination for Female Performance in a Comedy Programme and a Writers’ Guild of Great Britain award for best television situation comedy.

Then came the step up in fee scale. A recurring role across seven episodes of The Flight Attendant in 2022 we put at $175,000 to $420,000; the Netflix stand-up special SAP in 2023 at $300,000 to $800,000; and in September 2025 Netflix released Wayward, the eight-part thriller Martin created, wrote and starred in opposite Toni Collette, as Deadline reported. A creator-showrunner who is also the lead on an eight-episode streaming drama earns $1 million to $2.5 million across writing, producing and acting fees, which makes Wayward comfortably the largest job of their career.

Martin has won two Canadian Screen Awards as a writer on Baroness von Sketch Show and a third in 2024 for a guest performance in I Have Nothing. They won series fifteen of Taskmaster in 2023, which in Britain is a commercial event as much as a comic one: it reliably sells out theatre tours for whoever does well on it.

Recognition at home has come more recently. CBC News and the Juno Awards announced in January 2026 that Martin would host the fifty-fifth Juno Awards in Hamilton, the first comedian to host the ceremony alone since 2009 — a role that puts a British-based Canadian comic in front of a national television audience at home.

Martin’s earnings come from the work itself rather than from brands, and that follows from the kind of comic they are: the material is personal and unsponsored, and the audience is built on that. What they do instead is the professionally equivalent work — festival appearances, awards hosting and broadcaster promotion — which pays fees rather than sponsorship.

The Juno hosting fee is a good example of the scale involved. Hosting a national awards broadcast pays a comic of their standing $25,000 to $75,000 on our estimate, and corporate and festival bookings across a year add perhaps the same again. It is a useful supplement rather than a pillar of the figure below.

Martin’s business is authorship rather than enterprise. Co-creating Feel Good and then creating Wayward means holding format and underlying rights, which is a materially different position from being cast in someone else’s show: a creator participates in further series, in international sales and in any remake, for years after delivery.

They have also built a smaller second line in music. A debut indie-rock album, I’m a TV, was released through Universal Music Canada in February 2025. Records of that kind rarely produce meaningful income for a comedian, and we treat it as worth $10,000 to $50,000, but it is the credential that made the Juno hosting job a natural fit.

Martin has been based in London since 2011 and works across Britain, Canada and the United States, which means a career of travel costs against fees earned in three currencies. Their retained wealth most likely sits as property equity and pension, which we put at $300,000 to $500,000 net of mortgage.

The larger part of what they own is not physical: the writing participation in Feel Good and Wayward, two Netflix specials, publishing income from the 2019 book and a recorded album. Those are long-tail assets that pay out slowly, which is why a figure for a writer-performer moves less sharply than one for an actor of comparable fame.