'You kind of had to be like water and flow and pivot when you needed to because no one knew what he was going to say,' Marsden says. For one, the show was only partially scripted, and the actors constantly had to shift in response to what Gladden did. Marsden, whose film and TV credits include four X-Men movies, The Notebook, Enchanted, Westworld and Dead to Me, says Jury Duty was like no other acting job he's ever experienced. Marsden says that they told him: 'We're surrounding him with is this cast of bizarre, eccentric weirdos and hopefully carving out a path for him to become the leader at the end, and have his 12 Angry Men moment, where he inspires us all and unites us and then we pull the curtain back and celebrate him as a human being.' Instead, Marsden says, the intention was to create a 'hero's journey' for Gladden. But they assured him that Jury Duty wouldn't be cruel or mean-spirited. 'Is this even something that is ethically right to do, to play with someone's human experience over the course of three weeks of their life?'įrom the beginning, Marsden told show creators Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky (who also worked on The Office) that he didn't want to participate in a prank show. 'I had many reservations, and the biggest one was the wild card of this one human being who's being dropped into this situation that is all fake and manufactured,' Marsden says. Actor James Marsden, who plays a satirical, egotistical version of himself, calls the show a 'very ambitious conceit.'

But what Ronald doesn't know is that the whole thing is fake - the entire courthouse has been fitted with hidden cameras and everyone there except him is an actor.

Cameras track Ronald as he goes to the LA courtroom, is picked as the jury foreperson and follows along with the court proceedings. In the Amazon Freevee series Jury Duty, a solar contractor named Ronald Gladden has agreed to participate in what he believes is a documentary about the experience of being a juror. The new show Jury Duty has its genetic roots in the old TV show Candid Camera, where surprising things happened to unwitting bystanders - and hidden cameras captured their reactions.

Fake by Tate James