Why Ronald Gladden Thinks He Was Chosen for ‘Jury Duty’ [Exclusive]

Ronald Gladden was chosen to be the surprise starring role in Amazon Freevee’s Jury Duty after what he says was an “arduous” application process. It took so long and was so extensive that he considered dropping out at one point. But he was between jobs at the time and had nothing better to do. So he continued on. Over 2,500 people applied for the fake documentary. But, in the end, the slot went to Gladden. And if you ask almost anyone who’s seen the show, they’ll tell you he was the perfect choice. It’s hard to imagine anyone else navigating the wild hijinks that surrounded him. Gladden spoke to Showbiz Cheat Sheet about his time on the show, including why he believes he was chosen for the experiment.

Ronald Gladden used to be a different person    

One of the reasons Gladden works so well on Jury Duty is that he’s a specific kind of good person. Other people’s experiences occupy the forefront of his mind. But when I asked him to tell me what he was like in high school, he said he “definitely was a different person.”

“I lived a much more selfish lifestyle,” he said. “I acted much more in my own self interest. I still thought about how my actions affected others but I was just a bit more selfish. I just didn’t really care.” 

So what changed?

“I just woke up one day and I just decided I got more joy helping others than just doing things to benefit myself,” he said. “It just felt better to help other people. I felt better about myself at the end of the day. So that mapped out my life.”

Why Ronald thinks he was chosen for ‘Jury Duty’ 

Alexis Sampietro is the producer who gave the green light signaling that Gladden was the one. She worked with him throughout the entire interview process and he says she’s “amazing” and that he’s “beyond grateful” to her. 

“What I think she saw was someone who was just open and honest,” he explained. “Because during our interview process, I was just very honest with her about everything. She would ask me, have I listened to this podcast, have I seen this… According to her, some of the people she was interviewing, they’d lie about those. They’d say, ‘Oh yeah, I’ve heard of this, Oh I’ve seen this.’ And then she would press them further to get details and that’s when she would figure out that they were lying. So just small things like that. They were trying to give her the answers they thought she wanted to hear, whereas I was just completely open with her.”

Gladden’s openness clearly comes through throughout the series, whether it was lying for people to save their reputations (James Marsden’s giant s***) or accepting someone a little different (watching A Bug’s Life with Todd). It was an important element in the alchemy of the show. 

Ronald has never served on a real jury

Another reason that Gladden was chosen as the star of Jury Duty was that he’d never seen certain shows. As part of the interview process, he was asked if he’d seen projects his fellow jurors had been in. 

“They made sure to ask specific titles because obviously Mekki being in Sex Lives of College Girls, it was a fairly new show when I did this, if I would have recognized him — whole thing was blown,” he said. 

Another important piece of the puzzle was that Gladden had never served on a real jury prior to his experience with the show. 

“People don’t understand how I would have thought that this whole thing was real,” he said. “But going in, one of the requirements was that I could have never served on jury duty before. That was the number one main requirement. So you could have not known anything about this process. So I don’t know what was accurate, I don’t know what was embellished slightly, and I don’t know what was completely fake. I had no frame of reference going into that.”

Everything about Ronald, who he is and who he’s not (a prior jury duty participant), made him the perfect juror number 6.