Jury Duty star Ronald Gladden talks about life after his fake Freevee court case

“It was a huge sigh of relief," he says, to find out that James Marsden isn't really such a weirdo

By Sam Barsanti  |  May 2, 2023 | 12:50am
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Jury Duty star Ronald Gladden talks about life after his fake Freevee court case
James Marsden, Ronald Gladden Photo: JC Olivera

Freevee’s Jury Duty is the rare elaborate prank show that is actually nice, and that’s entirely because central prank victim Ronald Gladden seems like a normal good dude. The premise of the show, as we detailed back when it premiered, is that Gladden think he’s on a documentary about jurors when, in fact, all of his fellow jurors (and the judge, and the lawyers, etc.) are actors playing characters—even the one guy playing himself, famous person James Marsden. Whenever his fellow jurors do something scripted to be wacky, Gladden rejects the opening to be cruel or critical and just accepts them for who they are and embraces the weird situation they’ve all found themselves in. (One could argue that this forces Jury Duty to push its “plot” in weird ways that don’t always involve Gladden, which kind of misses The Point of the show since it’s all ostensibly done for him, but either way that’s not his fault.)

Social media loves someone it can champion, so obviously a lot of people have come out on the other side of Jury Duty with a lot of appreciation for Gladden and the genial way he reacts to being on the show, especially once he’s informed that it is a show. Variety caught up with him to see how things have been going since Jury Duty premiered, and it sounds like it didn’t really hit until recently, when Twitter and TikTok users started hyping him up—though Gladden doesn’t have Twitter or TikTok, telling Variety that a lot of social media is “detrimental to people’s mental health,” so things haven’t changed that much for him.

But as for the revelation that he spent a few weeks of his life thinking that he was a juror on a real court case and he had made friends with a wacky array of people, Gladden says he never felt “truthfully angry” about it. He says there was “so much to process” at first that he didn’t even have time to get mad, and if the other people on the show hadn’t turned out to be so nice and supportive—one of the best things about the show’s finale is that everyone is very careful not to completely freak Gladden out—then it might’ve been different.

The other main highlight of the show is the friendship between Gladden and James Marsden, who is playing a very self-obsessed and slightly unhinged version of himself. Gladden says that he never met a famous person before doing Jury Duty, so spending all of this time with Marsden—running through bizarre lines in a script, having to cover for him after he breaks a toilet in an embarrassing way—just made him think that all celebrities are secretly very weird. “It was a huge sigh of relief” he says, after finding out that Marsden was just doing it for the show.

Jury Duty ends with Gladden being presented with $100,000 as a prize for just being a generally nice guy who always stood up for his fellow jurors and was never mean to them (which makes us wonder what would’ve happened if he hadn’t been such a nice guy, but that’s apparently a bullet they dodged), and Variety asked what he’s going to do with it. His answer is… kind of sad, but very real: He says a third is going to taxes, and the rest is going to student loans. “It’s really not gonna go that far,” he says, noting that even that much money isn’t a whole lot in Southern California.

 
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