'Jury Duty' 's Ronald Gladden Says It Took 'Months' to Work Through What Was Real or Not After Filming
Showrunner Cody Heller tells PEOPLE Ronald's mental health "always came first" while pulling off the epic mockumentary
Ronald Gladden is finally in on the Jury Duty joke — but it wasn't easy to shake everything he saw.
The rising star tells PEOPLE what it was like to learn the whole show was an elaborate prank — and he was the only one who thought it was real. "It's gone back to normal now, yes," he says of his understanding of the Freevee show.
"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?" he adds. "It took months for me to come to the realization that this actually happened and to accept it."
The series followed a mock jury selection and trial. Everyone on set was a paid improv actor — except for Ronald, who really thought he was part of a televised trial. He met a cast of characters, including actor James Marsden — who played an elitist version of himself — a man who wore a camelback water pouch on his back the entire time, and a man who readily declared himself as "racist" to get out of jury duty.
With such a wild bunch, showrunner Cody Heller tells PEOPLE that Ronald's mental health was always at the top of mind. The cast and crew were dedicated to maintaining an air of realness — and never pushing the boundaries in a damaging way.
"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," she says. "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?"
Related:James Marsden and Jury Duty's Ronald Are Real Life Friends After Filming: 'He's a Purehearted Human'
At times, the ruse was nearly exposed — especially when Marsden an other cast members had a real-life conversation while Ronald went to the bathroom.
"We didn't know he was in the room because he balked, he went to the bathroom and he balked and came back in," Marsden says. "So we were really careful then on after, like, 'We can't have conversation. We have to have to assume he is in the room at all times.'"
In the end, they pulled it off. Viewers loved it — with Ronald becoming somewhat of an online sensation for how gracefully he handled his roller coast experience.
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All episodes of Jury Duty are now available to stream on Freevee, Amazon's free streaming service.
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