Fresh Air · 2026-03-20 · 47 min · 7,709 words

‘Jury Duty’ star James Marden / Remembering Roy Book Binder

Listen to the original audio · Transcribed with NVIDIA Parakeet · Timestamps stay in sync with the live audio

This election season you can streamline your news intake with up first. Our team of reporters and editors works overnight so you can start every morning with three stories you need to know in short episodes, 12-14 minutes long, to save you time and your sanity. Follow up first on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Fresh Air. I'm David B.

and Cooley. Jury Duty is the Prime video streaming series about one unwitting regular guy who becomes part of a staged fake jury, not knowing that everyone around him is a professional actor. Season two of Jury Duty premieres today on Prime, but in a new setting, the corporate retreat of a fake hot sauce company called Rockin' Grandmas, which is in the midst of a corporate takeover. Again, one lone employee knows nothing of the ruse and is surrounded by actors. The new season is called Jury Duty Presents Company Retreat.

Today we're going to listen to our 2023 interview with James Marsden, the most well known of the actors in the original Jury Duty. In that show, a regular guy named Ronald Gladden had agreed to participate in a documentary about the experience of being a juror in an LA courtroom. He doesn't know that everyone around him, the rest of the jury, the judge, the witnesses, is an actor who is improvising. They're all kind of odd, and their behavior is unpredictable, even more so than in a regular reality show. Marsden plays a satirical, self absorbed version of himself, serving as an alternate juror.

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