The Russian FOX Attacks Cosby Actor For Working At Trader Joe's

[TheBlackAdder]

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While it seems most actors barely get by and can not rely on residuals, especially when The Cosby Show is pulled off of the air... Russian FOX wants to pick on this one guy, for some reason. The Twitter replies are something.

Actor Geoffrey Owens was lucky (and talented) enough to be part of that bottled lightning back in the day. He played Elvin, the husband of Cosby's eldest daughter (and father to Cosby's grandchildren). That's the kind of job that actors dream of: being part of a top-rated show with a cast and crew at the height of their game.

That was also 26 years ago. "The Cosby Show" is long gone. Reruns had pretty consistently aired since Cosby shuttered production in 1992, but were pulled after Bill Cosby was charged with sexual assault. (In truth, most actors, unless they have some sort of producer credit or deal, only see residuals from reruns for the first few times the shows are aired).

Owens has kept working, though. His IMDb credits show a decent level of consistency, mostly doing episodic work. He also taught acting classes for other aspiring actors.

But acting gigs are sporadic. That's the nature of it. It's hard to raise a family on inconsistency of finding work (trust me, freelancing is a tough way to survive). SAG/AFTRA estimates that fewer than 20 percent of their membership are making over $100K/year. Many actors supplement their income with second and third jobs that allow them the flexibility to audition, but provide steady income (and health benefits).

Fox News
?Verified account @FoxNews

'Cosby Show' actor Geoffrey Owens spotted bagging groceries at NJ Trader Joe's (more in the tweet)

Link to tweet

https://crooksandliars.com/2018/09/fox-news-attacks-cosby-actor-working


FOX News is just a bunch of sick fucks, bent on destroying this country, as its foreigner founder wants.

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[peekaloo]

1. The same jag offs who advocate "pulling oneself up by their bootstraps"

fuck 'em

[TheBlackAdder]

2. The guys acts part-time and volunteers his time teaching acting to high school students.

[LakeArenal]

3. They tout their "everyone should work"

But they really have no respect for working folks.

[Wellstone ruled]

4. Not only Actors,

Writers and Stag Hands are in the same boat. Have one in the Family,it is a Gig to Gig Business.

[Me.]

5. He's Making An Honorable Living

unlike the hundreds (apparently) we could mention so good for him. And I love TJ's

[WhiskeyGrinder]

6. I can think of a better Cosby actor to go after...

[no_hypocrisy]

7. I sense an ulterior motive for this reporting:

To publicize and embarrass this guy, maybe to get him fired.

I learned there is no such thing as a bad job compared to not working. I'm speaking from personal experience. I'm a certified teacher and certified attorney and make most of my income from substitute teaching. And I don't minimize or apologize as I'm a very good substitute teacher.

The "sick fucks" on FOX should know what it's like to be "between jobs" indefinitely.

[Roland99]

8. The Shaming of Geoffrey Owens and the Inability to See Actors as Laborers, Too

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-shaming-of-geoffrey-owens-and-the-inability-to-see-actors-as-laborers-too

om Alamy
Not long ago, I was visiting the set of a popular TV show for a story and recognized an actor who was there shooting a guest spot. I remembered Geoffrey Owens not from “The Cosby Show,” on which he played Elvin Tibideaux for five seasons, but from my sophomore year at Yale, where he was teaching undergraduate acting. Owens, the son of the former U.S. congressman Major Owens, had himself graduated cum laude from Yale, in 1983, and has since taught at Primary Stages and Columbia University. He’s also been on Broadway—most recently in 2013, in “Romeo and Juliet”—and on prestige TV shows such as “The Affair.”

In other words, Owens is what we think of as a successful working actor: known but not a “celebrity,” with an IMDb page that rarely skips a year. Apparently, that’s why a woman shopping at Trader Joe’s last week, in Clifton, New Jersey, was so jarred to see Owens bagging groceries that she snapped his photo and sent it to the Daily Mail, which ran the headline, “From learning lines to serving the long line!” Fox News picked up the story, and on Saturday a Twitter storm erupted—most of it shaming Fox News for shaming Owens for working for a living. “So, 26 years after one TV job, this guy looks differently (shock) and is earning an honest living at a Trader Joe’s. The people taking his picture and passing judgment are trash,” the actor Justine Bateman tweeted. The editor Max Weiss wrote, “RT if you think Geoffrey Owens took a much more honorable path in his life than Bill Cosby.” Even Dana Loesch, the N.R.A. spokeswoman, weighed in: “I hate stories like this. He’s a man working hard, there’s shame in publishing this story but not in this man’s job.”

As egregious as the story was, it was a fitting subject going into Labor Day weekend. We don’t tend to think of actors as laborers, despite the robust unions that represent them—Actors’ Equity and sag-aftra. The most visible actors serve as aspirational figures, celebrated (or vilified) for their glamour and luxury. When we do hear about salaries, even in the context of gender discrimination, it’s often in the million-dollar range. As plenty of people pointed out on social media, conservative outlets like Fox paint Hollywood actors as coastal élites, out of touch with working Americans, only to turn around and “expose” one of them for earning a paycheck. There was, of course, a racial element as well, which the writer Mark Harris described as a subtext that begins “See? Even when you give them every opportunity, they still end up. . . .” One wonders if Owens would have drawn any attention if he’d been spotted working as a coal miner or some other “salt-of-the-earth” job thought of as honorable and manly, rather than in a “softer” form of labor that is itself suffering from what The Atlantic called “The Silent Crisis of Retail Employment.”

Actors have long been part of the gig economy. Roles and benefits come and go unpredictably. Side jobs with flexible hours are a fact of life. The performers I know have been office managers, S.A.T. tutors, dog-walkers, P.R .assistants, financial advisers, and, of course, waiters. One actor friend is learning calligraphy so she can start her own business. A comedian I know used to wait tables at a restaurant uptown, but she wouldn’t tell her friends which one it was, for fear of being caught in the act of working. Even when roles do come along, they can be a financial strain. One friend of mine was recently in a sold-out Off Broadway show that was critically acclaimed and extended twice, for which she earned a starting salary of five hundred and six dollars a week. Most non-performers think of the struggling-actor life as a temporary pit stop on the road to fame and fortune, but name recognition isn’t a retirement plan. It’s worth pointing out, too, that Owens is also a victim of Bill Cosby, with residual checks presumably drying up now that broadcasters are pulling “The Cosby Show” from syndication.