Tyler Perry offers Cosby Show actor Geoffrey Owens a TV gig for putting up with all this "job-shaming" bullshit

By William Hughes | September 5, 2018 | 2:34am

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If you were near the internet this weekend, there’s a decent chance you caught wind of the “saga” of former Cosby Show regular Geoffrey Owens, who picked up national attention after the U.K.’s Daily Mail ran an article about how incredibly wacky it is that working actors have to sometimes do jobs that are not actually acting in order to make ends meet. The Mail’s “revelation” that Owens—who played Elvin on several seasons of the NBC hit—was working at a Trader Joe’s in New Jersey set off a whole litany of commentary from people rightly annoyed that the Mail (and Fox News, which ran with the story after it was published in the tabloid) was attempting to shame him for, you know, working for a living. It also brought a great deal of attention to Owens himself, who still periodically acts, and who was probably not expecting to spend his weekend being turned into a living meme. But hey, at least he might get a job offer out of it:

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That’s per Variety, which notes that writer and director Tyler Perry has offered Owens a TV gig on a show he’s about to be working on. Owens—who, we’d like to stress again, was just trying to do his god damn job before some too-much-time-on-their-hands shutterbug decided to waltz into his life and make headlines out of his perfectly normal (and pretty good, from what we hear about Trader Joes’ employment practices) gig—has expressed a great deal of ambivalence about this whole situation, noting that, “Every job is worthwhile and valuable, and if we have a rethinking about that because of what has happened to me, that would be great.” That being said, he also sounds cautiously optimistic about Perry’s offer, telling Entertainment Tonight, “Like, really? Are you actually saying come work with me? Because we’ve never worked together before. So, that’s a very, very generous thing for him to say. And we’ll see what happens with that. But that’s encouraging.”