Geoffrey Owens, known for his recurring role on The Cosby Show, is all too familiar with what happens when one is recognizable in the age of smartphones. Late last summer, when a Trader Joe’s customer took some unflattering photos of Owens at his job in the Clifton, New Jersey, grocery store, he quit the job without giving notice. “I was kind of in a panic,” he told The New York Times then. What Owens didn’t know then was that, months later, he would be at the Screen Actors Guild Awards with plenty of acting jobs on his schedule. Near the beginning of the show, a camera panned to Owens and he said:
“So somewhere in the middle of the road in my life, I found myself in the dark wood of unemployment and debt, but instead of switching careers like a sane person, I took a job at the local Trader Joe’s to see if I could hang in there with my career, and it’s actually worked out pretty well. I’m Geoffrey Owens and I am an actor.”
Owens now has a consistent role on Tyler Perry’s The Haves and the Have Nots and is also appearing on NCIS: New Orleans; after the Trader Joe’s photos went viral in September, Perry offered Owens the job on his show via a tweet.
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The actor had been working at Trader Joe’s for more than a year before the viral photos, but he made clear during a Good Morning America interview that he was not ashamed to have taken the job.
“I hope what doesn’t pass is this idea that people are rethinking about what it means to work—the honor of the working person and the dignity of work,” he said. “I hope that this period that we’re in now where we have a heightened sensitivity about that and a re-evaluation of what it means to work and a re-evaluation of the idea that some jobs are better than others because that’s actually not true.”
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