Cosby show alum Geoffrey Owens said he still struggles to make ends meet after he was forced to quit his job at a Trader Joe’s store amid an “attack on my privacy.”
Owens, who played Sondra Huxtable’s partner, Elvin Tibideaux, on the NBC sitcom from 1985 to 1992, claimed he’s not “much better off” today than he was when a customer snapped a photo of him working behind the grocery store register in 2018.
“Even today, right now, as we speak, I still struggle to make a living,” Owens said during a recent appearance on an Atlanta radio station’s Big Tigger Morning Show.
“I struggle every day to make my ends meet. And people can’t get their heads around that because they see me in movies, whether it’s Mr. Santa or I’m on Poppa’s House on CBS right now,” he continued.
“People have the impression that, ‘You’re making a lot of money. What’s the problem? Why would you have financial troubles?’ They don’t understand the specifics of how my industry works.”
“I’m grateful for the work I have,” the 63-year-old later added. “I work more than a lot of people do, so I got to keep perspective.”
After he was photographed at the New Jersey Trader Joe’s, Owens said he was grateful for the public’s support but ended up leaving his cashier position for privacy reasons.
“It was strange because someone had been in the store taking pictures,” he explained. “And I was like, now that this is breaking, I’m not going to feel comfortable working in this store wondering who is around with a camera. It would just be too weird. I’m a very private person.”
“It wasn’t like I quit knowing I would be making a lot of money soon or anything,” he added. “I just felt like I wasn’t going to be able to handle that kind of scrutiny and attack on my privacy.”
According to People, the Yale University graduate and son of former New York congressman Major Owens was offered numerous acting opportunities after his Trader Joe’s photos went viral – he even accepted Tyler Perry’s offer to appear on his hit OWN drama, The Haves and the Have Nots.
He also received $25,000 from Nicki Minaj but donated it to charity because it “didn’t feel right to keep it” without working for it.
“At the time it seemed like the right thing to do,” Owens said on the radio show. “If Nikki Minaj had hired me, okay, she had paid me $25,000 to do something, I would have said, ‘Thank you for the work.’”
Since then, the Cosby show alum shared that he’s returned to Trader Joe’s “to ask for hours to work there again” despite the “job-shaming” he experienced in 2018.
“Honestly, I’m not much better off now than I was then,” he said, calling his residuals from The Cosby Show “never particularly wonderful.”
“I did maybe 20 percent of the show,” he noted. “People have a false you impression of what the average middle-class actor makes and their ability to make a living in the industry. That’s what drove me to work at Trader Joe’s to begin with.”
