BREAKING NEWS: Cosby Show Actor Geoffrey Owens Still Struggles to ‘Make Ends Meet’ After Leaving Trader Joe’s .giang

Geoffrey Owens is sharing an update on his life.

After The Cosby Show alum was seen working at Trader Joe’s in 2018, Owens said many expected to see a shift in his career. During a recent appearance on an Atlanta radio station’s Big Tigger Morning Show, however, he revealed making money only became more difficult.

“I struggle every day to make my ends meet,” he said. “And people can’t get their heads around that because they see me in movies, whether it’s Mr. Santa or I’m on Poppa’s House on CBS right now. People have the impression that, ‘You’re making a lot of money. What’s the problem? Why would you have financial troubles?’ They don’t understand the specifics of how my industry works.”

“I’m grateful for the work I have,” he later added. “I work more than a lot of people do, so I got to keep perspective.”

After he was photographed at the New Jersey Trader Joe’s, Owens, 63, said he was grateful for the support he received from the public, but he ended up having to leave the cashier job for privacy reasons.

“It was strange because someone had been in the store taking pictures,” he explained. “And I was like, now that this is breaking, I’m not going to feel comfortable working in this store wondering who is around with a camera. It would just be too weird. I’m a very private person.”

“It wasn’t like I quit knowing I would be making a lot of money soon or anything,” he added. “I just felt like I wasn’t going to be able to handle that kind of scrutiny and attack on my privacy.”

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PEOPLE previously reported that Owens was offered opportunities in the entertainment industry when the photos emerged — he even accepted producer/filmmaker Tyler Perry‘s offer to appear on his hit OWN drama, The Haves and the Have Nots. He also received $25,000 from Nicki Minaj but opted to donate the money to the Actor’s Fund in memory of the late Earle Hyman, who played Cliff’s father on The Cosby Show. 

“At the time it seemed like the right thing to do,” he said on the radio show. “If Nikki Minaj had hired me, okay, she had paid me $25,000 to do something, I would have said, ‘Thank you for the work.’”

Since then, Owens shared that he has gone back to Trader Joe’s “to ask for hours to work there again” despite the “job-shaming” he experienced in 2018.

“Honestly, I’m not much better off now than I was then,” he said, calling his residuals from The Cosby Show “never particularly wonderful.”

“I did maybe 20 percent of the show,” he noted. “People have a false you impression of what the average middle-class actor makes and their ability to make a living in the industry. That’s what drove me to work at Trader Joe’s to begin with.”