Deep Fake with Jury Duty

Casting director Susie Farris says Amazon Freevee's Jury Duty was unlike anything she had ever done. The eight-episode documentary-style comedy follows Ronald Gladden, a real person serving jury duty in Los Angeles. What he doesn't know is that everyone around him is an actor, the trial is fake and the show's chaotic take on the judicial system is designed to hit specific plot points.

To create the Truman Show-like experiment, Farris had to cast everyone Gladden interacts with over the course of a three-week trial, including twelve jurors plus alternates, a plaintiff and defendant, attorneys and expert witnesses. James Marsden (Westworld) was also in the mix, playing an exaggerated version of himself, because is it really a Los Angeles jury without a famous face?

The project — which shot for seventeen days at a real courthouse — began with a generic casting notice seeking U.S. citizens eligible for jury duty. Farris received 5,000 replies — "the most submissions I had ever had in my casting career," she says. "Then we had to figure out who we had time to see, and we ended up seeing close to 1,000 people."

However, it wasn't as simple as casting a bunch of actors. Each role's traits and story were drawn, in part, from the actor who was ultimately cast, to reduce the chance that anyone would break character.

"If they break on day three, the whole show is over," explains director Jake Szymanski, who'd worked with Farris on a few projects, including Tour de Pharmacy. "You couldn't have someone feeling like they were putting on a character too much, because they had to live in it for so long each day."

Once they'd narrowed the pool for a callback, Farris did something rare in casting: she staged a fake focus-group scenario for the actors to mix with real participants. The idea was to see how well they could riff with non-actor costars. Plus, it gave them a sense of just how immersive the real show would be.

Even then, "They probably didn't know the magnitude of what they were getting themselves into," says Farris, whose résumé includes The Conners, Homecoming, Physical and Grand Crew.

The executive producers, including Szymanski, cast Gladden separately. The unassuming star's journey began when he answered a Craigslist ad seeking first-time jurors willing to have their experience filmed for a documentary.

"For this to work, we had to find the one percent of the one percent that matched the guidelines we needed," Szymanski says. "That's the most incredible part of this, what Susie was able to do with this cast." 

This article originally appeared in emmy magazine issue #7, 2023, under the title, "Deep Fake."