19 Behind-The-Scenes Facts About "Jury Duty" That You Might Not Know, But Definitely Should
Jury Duty has been the talk of the town since it's debut on Amazon Freevee earlier this month.
The mockumentary series follows a group of jurors sitting on a trial, but the kicker is that this whole thing is a prank and everyone is an actor, except for one juror named Ronald Gladden, who thinks the whole thing is legit.
And since I devoured the series in a day, I obviously couldn't function until I'd Googled every single thing about the show, the actors, and how it all went down. Here's everything I learned:
1.Ronald was genuinely in the dark about the entire thing — he actually thought he was filming a documentary about jury duty, which was why he wasn't phased by any of the cameras, mics, or reshooting of scenes.
2.Ronald actually applied for the series through an ad on Craigslist.
At the time, he was in between jobs and saw a listing for people willing to be part of a jury pool for a civil trial that'd be filmed by a camera crew. They were also specifically looking for someone who'd never served on a jury before, so that they didn't have too many expectations of how it all went down.
3.About 2,500 candidates volunteered to participate in the "documentary." So, when searching for the perfect non-actor to cast in the show, the producers fell in love with Ronald because he's just such a "good person" and they felt he was a great contrast with the rest of the actors involved.
"When I was first approached with the idea for this project, I said, 'Hey, I don't want to do anything that's mean, or torturing someone, or making fun of someone, or just punching down the whole time.' You can't do that for three weeks, even if you thought you picked someone who deserved it. And I was assured that everyone was on the same page. No one wanted to do that. And it's true. Our showrunner, our producers, our writers: Everyone was on the same page. We wanted to surround a good person with crazy people making crazy choices," said director Jake Szymanski.
"Ronald just surpassed all of our expectations. How he cared about people and how he reacted to people: He was better than we ever could have hoped," he added.
Alexis Sampietro, who's worked on several of Sacha Baron Cohen's projects, also had an inkling that Ronald would be the perfect choice.
4.Ronald never anticipated becoming a celebrity or even a reality TV star. But since the series debuted the positive fan reaction has been surreal for him.
5.The series was created by Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky, who both worked as writers/producers on The Office, so they understand the mockumentary-style verrrrry well.
6.To really drive home the "documentary" facade, Ronald only ever saw "three camera people, a producer, and a couple of sound people working on the film," even though the series' production team employed about 100.
7.But since the "documentary crew" couldn't be with the jurors during after-hours they installed hidden cameras and fake mirrors.
One of the episodes they needed to do this for was Episode 4 when they went to Margaritaville. “We had to build, like, Jimmy Buffett Margaritaville-themed camera blinds,” Jake told Prime Timer. “There were bamboo structures with mirrors in them. We were hiding cameras in scuba tank lighting fixtures…and then we also had to amplify the lighting in Margaritaville, at the table where everyone was sitting…so that we could see them on our zoom lenses shooting through fake mirrors.”
8.Literally every single person who appears in the series was a paid extra or a production team member.
“After we revealed to Ronald that he’d been on a show, and we said, ‘Everyone you’ve interacted with in the last three weeks has been an actor,’ it took him a long time to process that,” said Jake. “Like eight hours later, he just goes, ‘Wait, wait. So Margaritaville. What about those people who bumped me on the shoulder and said two words to me?' And they were actors.”
9.The trial itself lasted 17 days and included 12 witnesses and 28 pieces of evidence, so there's over 30 hours of in-court testimony that was filmed. But we only got to see about four hours of it.
The series was filmed over three weeks, so the actors had to keep up their personas to keep Ronald totally in the dark.
Some of Ron's favorite moments from the experience didn't even make the final cut. “Those moments that didn’t make it, nobody would’ve ever believed me if I would’ve told him, if this wouldn’t have all been filmed,” Ronald told GQ. “Like the one that one that comes to my mind all the time is that when we were at the taco truck, when James offers to buy everybody lunch and then the judge walks by and obviously it doesn’t work, they ask him for his credit card—I don’t know why they didn’t include this—but he turned to me and he’s like, ‘Hey, do you wanna split this with me?’ I was like, ‘No!’ That was a hilarious moment to me.”
10.In the series, the bailiff explains that they split the jurors up into two hotels, because one was fully booked. But actually, those other actors couldn't spend weeks away from their families so they'd just go home for the night.
Ross Kimball, who played Ross Kubiak, explained, "We told Ronald that there was a mix up. That when they booked the hotel, the hotel overbooked, so only a few people could stay in that hotel where Ronald was staying. We were staying at the 'other hotel.' In reality, we all have families and we couldn't do that. At the end of the day, we got in two separate vans going to 'two separate hotels' but we would leave – they would go to their hotel – we would go around the block, come back, get in our cars and leave. We'd come back a few hours before they were coming back, have breakfast at the courthouse, get in a van and then go around the block and then wait for them to pull in. Then, we'd pull in at the same time so it looked like we were coming from our hotel."
11.Even though they were playing characters, the other actors tried to be as real as possible with Ron. When they could, they told him real stories about themselves so they could build a genuine friendship — they even still talk and hang out.
12.Before Ronald knew the whole series was a prank, he said that he was closest to fellow juror Inez, who's played by Maria Russell.
13.Ken (Ron Song), Noah (Mekki Leeper), and Todd (David Brown) were among the jurors who played characters who were very different from themselves IRL.
Ronald said, "They played characters that were complete 180 opposites of who they really are. The best way I can describe my relationship with those three [is] I'm fascinated by them, because I got to know them one way. Turns out they're the complete opposite. And now it’s like, I just wanna know everything I can get to know about them."
14.David Brown was in a particular situation because he actually shared a door with Ronald at the hotel. Afraid of ruining the whole secret, he stayed in character pretty much the entire time.
"He literally was in character the entire time," said Ron. "The other actors, they got their phones back obviously when I [wasn’t] around. [David] was so afraid of blowing this because we shared a door, he wouldn’t text, he wouldn’t do anything on his phone ‘cause he didn’t know if I could hear him or not. And he just didn’t wanna be the person to ruin it. So that guy was Todd the entire time."
15.Ronald even said he was "so relieved" that James Marsden was much kinder IRL than how he presents himself in the series.
“Towards the end when I really did truly believe that’s who James was, I was heartbroken. Then after, when I realized that that’s not who he was, I was just so relieved," Ronald told GQ.
16.Ron's girlfriend was also in on the whole prank and she helped convince him that it was totally normal for the jury to be sequestered and have their phones taken away, especially since a famous person like James Marsden was a juror.
17.A majority of the series was improvised, but just so producers could maintain some sort of structure, they gave certain actors earpieces to guide them.
Additionally, any time an actor went out for a bathroom break or a documentary interview, the producers would chat with them. “They’d go to the bathroom, or the documentary crew would say they had to do an interview with them and chat with them in the middle of the day,” said Jake. “And sometimes when I got to speak to an actor I would say, ‘I’m going to be zoomed in on you. Give me more reactions. I know you already played the scene. But say something else.'”
18.The courthouse used in the series wasn't even functioning anymore — it'd literally only been used as a haunted house in recent years — so the production crew rehabilitated it to look as real as possible.
“When we first scouted, there was no power, so it was pitch black and there was fake blood and fake human remains scattered around the place,” executive producer Nicholas Hatton said.
19.Finally, Ronald also explained that he "couldn't process it all" when he first found out the last three weeks had been a joke. It took him a few days to fully make sense of it all.
"On the day of the reveal, there was so much that was going on, it was like sensory overload," he said. "I couldn’t process it all. I could barely even process small amounts of it. So on the day of the actual reveal, once I started realizing that what they were saying was true, and it wasn’t a joke, all I could do was accept my reality for what it was and just kind of just go throughout the day and just say, 'Hey, this is happening.' I didn't even begin to process stuff until the weekend after.
