In one of Malcolm-Jamal Warner‘s final on-screen appearances, the beloved actor reflected on the role that made him feel like everyone’s on-screen cousin, brother, and friend — Theo Huxtable.
Warner appears in Issa Rae’s new documentary, Seen & Heard: The History of Black Television, which is a two-part documentary exploring the cultural impact of Black representation on TV. The late actor appears in the first installment, Seen, where he shares intimate memories about the audition process for what would become one of Black television’s most iconic roles.
“When I auditioned for ‘Cosby,’ I was 13,” Warner recalls. “I’d been watching Diff’rent Strokes and watching these kids on television be smart alecks and what have you. That’s what my acting had been influenced by.”
Despite feeling confident about his audition, Warner vividly remembered the one person in the room whose expression did not mirror everyone else’s: Bill Cosby.
“I killed in the room, I was getting the laughs, and I’m thirteen. And I finished my audition, and everybody was smiling except Mr. Cosby,” Warner said. “And he looked at me and he said, ‘Would you really talk to your father like that?’ I said, ‘No.’ He said, ‘I don’t want to see that on this show.’”
The 54-year-old acknowledged that the family sitcom offered a level of Black storytelling that had not been seen before in Hollywood. “Mr. Cosby made certain that everyone was acutely aware that ‘The Cosby Show’ was his brainchild,” Warner explained. “But then you have these other creatives, you know, there’s a network producer, writers, you know, studio coming in, trying to tell him how to do his show, and every step of the way, Mr. Cosby had to stop them and remind them that’s not the show that we’re doing.
“I watched him do that from year one to year eight. That battle never, never stopped, until the show stopped,” he added.
Warner also shared that his role as Theo touched so many who watched, even years after the showed stopped filming. “I was getting tens of thousands of letters from people who were saying, ‘Thank you. Thank you for the show. We are the Huxtables,’ and you know, and the show obviously got criticized for not being Black enough, not being a real depiction of the Black experience,” he said in the doc.
Warner sadly died on July 20 in a tragic drowning while vacationing in Costa Rica.
Aside from Seen & Heard, fans will still get one more chance to see Warner on October 7 in the second episode of Fox’s crime drama Murder in a Small Town, PEOPLE reported.
Both parts of Seen & Heard: The History of Black Television are now streaming on HBO Max.
