Jury Duty's Ronald Gladden Thought He Was Still Being Filmed After the Show Ended

Freevee's Jury Duty came to a conclusion on a high note. Ronald Gladden, the unwitting star of the comedy-reality series hybrid in which he believed he was performing jury duty but in reality everyone else was an actor, was handed a check for $100,000 and given a behind-the-scenes look at the production, where he learned that hidden cameras had been filming him everywhere for the last three weeks. Everyone came clean and told him how great he was, and Gladden, being the good sport he is, laughed and smiled through it all.

But while everyone else packed up the cameras and went back to their lives when all was said and done, Gladden went back to his normal life — or tried to — unsure of his reality. Everything he had just participated in and all the people he had just met were all fake, and unseen entities were watching him out of his sight. 

"After everything was revealed and then after I came home for the weekend, I started getting paranoid," Gladden told TV Guide before the series premiered. "I started freaking out and I was like, 'I feel like I'm being followed,' so I was texting [Jury Duty star] James [Marsden] and I was telling him this. James just being the wonderful person that he is, he called me up. We talked on the phone for like 30-45 minutes and he just helped me accept reality, accept fate. He reassured me there were no cameras following me around and he really helped me start working through those emotions."

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Even a human with a Fort Knox-level of security for their own sanity would have trouble reintegrating into society after having their entire reality blown up in their face, on TV, no less. Making it even harder, Gladden wasn't able to talk about it with many people. When I spoke to him at the end of March, days before the show premiered, he hadn't even told his coworkers that he was about to be the star of a television show, and he was using his lunch break to sneak out and do the interview. Even his own girlfriend had a hard time believing what he had just been through. 

Because Gladden was cooped up for so long thinking he was sequestered for trial, all he wanted to do was get outside once he was done, so he took his girlfriend out to restaurants and spent pretty much his entire first weekend of freedom out of the house. But this only caused more issues. 

"I just kept making this weird eye contact with people and then they would instantly divert their gaze, and it kept happening everywhere I went," he said. "So then I catch myself looking over my shoulder and I was just feeling paranoid, because I just thought that they were still filming me. Ultimately I was just kind of freaking out in the sense that I thought, 'I'm still being followed.'"

Thankfully, Gladden wasn't affected for too long, and today he feels fantastic. "A lot of people ask me how I feel now about the experience, and I'm overjoyed," he said. "I am beyond grateful to [the producers] for giving me this opportunity." 

The producers were well aware of the potential issues facing their subject, and they wanted to ensure that the experience was thought of as a good one and he wasn't the butt of a joke — not just for Gladden, but for the audience as well. That's why the season finale was dedicated to showing the entire reveal and the immediate aftermath, including shots of Gladden hanging out and having a good time with the same actors who fooled him.

"He's not an actor. He doesn't come from Hollywood and all that kind of stuff," executive producer Nicholas Hatton told TV Guide. "When we are telling him that, 'By the way, the entire world that you have experienced from where you go to sleep at night to where you eat to where you go in the morning has been entirely engineered and you've had no control over whatsoever,' that's a kind of an insane thing to hear on a judge's witness box. Fortunately, he took it in in great spirits."

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To be fair, it took a few days for everything to settle in for Gladden. His initial reaction, understandably, was shock.

"The first thing that I remember [when the actor playing the judge revealed it was all fake] was just, obviously, disbelief," Gladden said. "I didn't believe what he was saying to me. In order for me to accept what he was saying was true, I had to accept that the entire three weeks of my life up to that point had all been orchestrated, and it wasn't just inside the courtroom, this was outside of the courtroom in the hotel room. Literally everywhere I went during this three-week journey, it was all staged. I would have to question all of that, so I couldn't believe what he was saying. And truthfully, it took multiple days for the reality of the situation to set in."

As for Gladden's future, he's happy in San Diego working as a project manager for a construction company, an industry he's been in for 13 years. But he would take another shot at show business, and surprisingly, he says he wouldn't mind doing something like Jury Duty again. Only next time, let's tell him first.

The entire season of Jury Duty is now streaming on Freevee, Amazon's ad-supported streaming service.