“Jury Duty’s” Breakout Star Ronald Gladden Says It Took Him “Months And Months” To Process That The Whole Show Had Been Fake

If you haven’t watched Jury Duty, you’re missing out on one of the funniest TV shows of the last several years.

The series, which airs on Amazon Freevee (Amazon’s free streaming channel), is a mix of The Office and The Joe Schmo Show (if you’re old enough to remember that — if not, just know that it was an elaborate prank show set within a fake reality show).

And the premise is that they’re shooting a “documentary” about what it is like to serve jury duty, except one of the jurors doesn’t know that and thinks he is serving on a real jury.

That “juror” is Ronald Gladden (who’s also unknowingly the star of the show).

And recently, he spoke to People about the experience of filming the show and thinking that everything that was going on around him was real.

According to him, he has been able to process that the whole thing was fake, but that it took some time, saying, “But I’m not kidding, months and months down the road after this, I was still getting hit with things like, Oh wow, was that staged, was that fake, was that an actor?“

Ronald then went on to say, “It took months for me to come to the realization that this actually happened and to accept it.”

Even though it was not in any way a malicious prank that was being played on Ronald, the series showrunner, Cody Heller, told People that they took his mental health very seriously, saying, “His mental health obviously always came first, and we never wanted to do anything to traumatize him or do anything to make him feel bad in any way.”

Adding, “But the whole point of the show was to celebrate this guy being a hero, which I mean, who knew that we could wind up with literally the kindest man in the world?”