'Cosby Show' Actor Still Struggling to Make Ends Meet After Being Forced to Leave Grocery Store Job
We all choose whether to bear our particular crosses with bitter resentment or with dignity and Christian charity.
Actor Geoffrey Owens, who played Elvin Tibideaux on the iconic 1980s sitcom “The Cosby Show,” has chosen the latter.
In an interview last month on Atlanta’s V-103 radio, Owens explained that unflattering photos of him working at a Trader Joe’s grocery store in 2018 forced him to quit that job — and that he still struggles to make a living as an actor, but you would never know it from either his overall disposition or his message to the radio audience.
“For two weeks or more I was, like, one of the most famous people in the world,” the actor said.
According to the U.K.’s Daily Mail, in August 2018 a lesbian couple recognized Owens and snapped photos of him working at the store in Clifton, New Jersey.
Nonetheless, in a subsequent interview with CNN, the actor described himself as “only devastated for an hour or two.” Indeed, the support he received thereafter eclipsed the negativity associated with efforts to frame his employment at Trader Joe’s as a fall from grace.
As anyone who grew up in the 1980s can attest, “The Cosby Show” dominated Thursday night television. In fact, some might regard NBC’s Thursday night offerings in that decade as the best overall lineup in TV history.
Thus, the sight of a man who appeared in 128 episodes of “The Cosby Show” from 1985 to 1992 working in a grocery store undoubtedly struck some people as jarring.
Owens, however, simply did what he needed to do in order to survive.
Moreover, after the initial wave of attention receded, the actor had no qualms about returning to his old workplace.
“To be honest, I’ve gone back there since all of this happened, and basically I asked for hours to work there again,” because, as he explained, “I still struggle to make a living.”
Owens needed those hours in part because residual paychecks from “The Cosby Show” dried up following Bill Cosby’s infamous scandal. Dozens of women accused the longtime comedian and actor of sexual assault. He served nearly three years of a ten-year sentence for drugging and molesting a former female basketball player before having his conviction overturned by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.
In response to the scandal, networks and streaming services began pulling “The Cosby Show” from syndication in 2014, per CNN.
Thus, Owens certainly would have good reasons to harbor resentment.
Instead, throughout his difficulties he maintained his work ethic and perspective.
For instance, when singer Nicki Minaj heard of Owens’s plight, she sent him a $25,000 gift. But the actor donated the money to charity. Much as he appreciated it, he said, it did not seem right to accept the money for nothing.
“Listen, if Nicki Minaj had hired me — if she had paid me $25,000 to do something, right? — I would have said, ‘Thank you for the work,'” Owens said.
Best of all, the actor appeared on V-103 to promote his new movie, which he called “family-embracing.”
Owens plays the title character in 2024’s “Mr. Santa: A Christmas Extravaganga.” A quick glance at the film’s trailer on the online movie database IMDb, where it has a sparkling 9.1/10 rating, suggests that it might be well worth audiences’ time to check it out even now that Christmas has passed.
Readers who wish to view Owens’s entire interview may do so in the YouTube video below. The segment on his experience at Trader Joe’s began around the 6:12 mark.
During the interview, Owens never invoked the name of Jesus Christ.
In 2018, however, the actor did read Shakespeare at St. Luke’s Church in Montclair, New Jersey, per WABC-TV in New York.
Whatever his personal faith convictions, Owens has modeled Christian behavior, first by bearing his cross with dignity and now by promoting “family-embracing” entertainment. May God bless him and grant him success, for he appears to lack neither peace nor perspective.
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