SAN JOSE, Costa Rica (AP) — Malcolm-Jamal Warner, the actor who played teenage son Theo Huxtable on “The Cosby Show,” has died at age 54 in an accidental drowning in Costa Rica, authorities there said.
Costa Rica’s Judicial Investigation Department said Monday that Warner drowned Sunday afternoon on a beach on Costa Rica’s Caribbean coast. He was swimming at Playa Grande de Cocles in Limon province when a current pulled him deeper into the ocean.
“He was rescued by people on the beach,” the department’s initial report said, but first responders from Costa Rica’s Red Cross found him without vital signs and he was taken to the morgue.
Though he compiled a long and varied acting resume, Warner remained best-known for his first big role, as the only son of Bill Cosby’s character Cliff Huxtable on “The Cosby Show.” Warner was only a teenager when he was first cast in the show, and Cosby picked him personally.
“My biggest concern is when it comes to images of people of color on television and film, no matter what … negative stereotypes of people of color, we’ve always had ‘The Cosby Show’ to hold up against that,” Warner said in a 2015 interview, after the show’s biggest star was accused of rape and sexual assault by several women. “And the fact that we no longer have that, that’s the thing that saddens me.”
As an adult, Warner starred on “Sons of Anarchy” and “The People v. O.J. Simpson,” among several other shows and movies.
Most recently, Warner started a podcast called “Not All Hood” with Weusi Baraka and Candace Kelley about the various identities and perceptions of Black people throughout the U.S.
Contributing: Associated Press, Joseph Wilkinson of New York Daily News
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