Bill Cosby said that when he learned of the death of Malcolm-Jamal Warner, who played his son on “The Cosby Show,” he spoke with Phylicia Rashad, who played the mother.
“We were embracing each other over the phone about a dearly beloved friend … Malcolm was always embracing relationships with everybody he worked with,” Cosby told “CBS Weekend News” anchor Jericka Duncan in an interview.
Warner’s death shocked the entertainment world Monday when it became known that the performer drowned in Costa Rica the day before during a family vacation. The 54-year-old was apparently pulled out to sea by a current off the Central American nation’s Caribbean coast and he couldn’t be revived onshore, officials said.
A spokesperson for Cosby said in a statement that the 88-year-old former actor was devastated when he found out Warner had died. Cosby compared learning the news to when he was told that his son Ennis was killed in 1997, according to spokesperson Andrew Wyatt. “It felt the same way,” Wyatt said.
Cosby told Duncan he last spoke with Warner about three months ago about his music career. In 2015, Warner, with the Robert Glasper Experiment and Lalah Hathaway, won the Grammy for best traditional R&B performance with a cover of Stevie Wonder’s “Jesus Children of America.” Warner was also nominated for best spoken word poetry album at the 2023 Grammys.
“He was very proud of what he had done,” Cosby said.
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America watched Warner grow up as he played Theo Huxtable on “The Cosby Show” for the entirety of the show’s run from 1984 to 1992, earning Warner an Emmy nomination for outstanding supporting actor in a comedy series in 1986. In the interview with Duncan, Cosby praised Warner’s dedication to the profession.
“He was never afraid to go to his room and study and make sure he followed whatever he had learned in the acting school he went to,” Cosby said.
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In 2015, as Cosby faced multiple allegations of sexual assault, Warner told The Associated Press that “The Cosby Show” lost its place as a counter to the portrayal of negative stereotypes of people of color in movies and TV.
“And the fact that we no longer have that, that’s the thing that saddens me the most because in a few generations the Huxtables will have been just a fairy tale,” Warner told the AP.
Cosby was convicted in a Pennsylvania court in 2018, but the conviction was overturned in 2021.
In 2023, Warner spoke highly of his experience on “The Cosby Show” in an interview with CBS News Pittsburgh.
“That show had such an impact on the culture here in America but also a global impact on how, you know, Black people saw ourselves globally and how the rest of the world saw us,” he said. “So I’m proud to have been part of that legacy, and it’s been a great ride ever since.”
