Actor Malcolm-Jamal Warner, the actor who rose to fame as a teenager playing Theo Huxtable on 'The Cosby Show' in the mid-1980s, died in Costa Rica on July 20, 2025. He was 54. Photo: Sara D. Davis/The New York Times
Malcolm-Jamal Warner, the actor who rose to fame as a teenager playing Theo Huxtable on The Cosby Show in the mid-1980s, died in Costa Rica on Sunday. He was 54.
Warner apparently drowned while swimming at a beach on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica near Limón, according to the country’s Judicial Investigation Department. The authorities said in a statement that Warner had apparently been swept away by a strong current, and that bystanders had tried to rescue him. The area is popular with surfers.
The Cosby Show, which ran on NBC from 1984 to 1992, was a must-see-TV cultural touchstone whose final episode was covered as front-page news in The New York Times. That article began: “Theo Huxtable graduated from NYU yesterday, albeit on videotape, and like a lot of graduations it was a bittersweet occasion.”
Warner, who was 21 at the time, had played the role of the Huxtables’ middle child and only son since he was 13. The show’s portrayal of an upper-middle-class Black family — Bill Cosby and Phylicia Rashad played a doctor and a lawyer raising children in a Brooklyn town house — was celebrated as an overdue corrective against harmful stereotypes on television.
“It’s sad, in a way,” Warner said when its run ended. “Our extended family is breaking up. And I can be nostalgic to an extent. But the show for me has always been a steppingstone in my career. It’s too early in my career to be nostalgic.”
Warner would go on to act in dozens of television shows and films, including The Magic School Bus and nearly 100 episodes of The Resident, a gritty drama about a group of doctors. He co-starred in his own sitcom, Malcolm & Eddie, opposite comedian Eddie Griffin, over four seasons beginning in 1996.
In 2011, Warner stepped into the role of a TV dad himself in the short-lived comedy Reed Between The Lines, opposite Tracee Ellis Ross. Several years later, he played A.C. Cowlings, a friend to O.J. Simpson, in an iteration of Ryan Murphy’s American Crime Story anthology series.
Warner also directed television episodes, appeared in plays, wrote poetry and performed music as a bass player.
He found success as a spoken-word poet, winning a Grammy Award in 2015 for his contribution to the Robert Glasper Experiment’s version of the Stevie Wonder classic Jesus Children Of America, featuring vocals by Lalah Hathaway and a spoken-word tribute by Warner to the victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Connecticut. Two years ago, he received a Grammy nomination for best spoken word poetry album for Hiding In Plain View.
The actor apparently drowned while swimming at a beach on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica near Limón, according to the country’s Judicial Investigation Department. Photo: AP
Malcolm-Jamal Warner was born Aug 18, 1970, in Jersey City, New Jersey. His family moved to Los Angeles when he was five, according to an interview with Backstage.
Warner began acting as an after-school activity, he told Backstage, and a national search for Theo Huxtable provided his breakthrough moment. In his audition, Warner said, he rolled his eyes and played the character with a precocious attitude. Cosby quickly dismissed that approach, asking him to work on the character and return later.
“I thought I had blown it, but I worked on the scene with my acting teacher,” Warner said. “This time when I auditioned, it was real. Mr. Cosby’s philosophy is that all humour is based on truth.”
Millions watched his character negotiate the pitfalls of adolescence and the awkward teenage years. On the show Cliff and Clair Huxtable (Cosby and Rashad) also raised four daughters, Sondra, Denise, Vanessa and Rudy.
Complete information on Warner’s survivors was not immediately available.
Last year, Warner started a podcast with Candace Kelley and Weusi Baraka, Not All Hood, about the experiences and identities of Black people in the United States. He told the Today show last year that the podcast was started to create a safe space to share critical points of view.
“This is a place where we want to be able to discuss all lanes of the Black community,” he said. “This is a place where we can have civil discourse and respectful challenges.”
But to many people he would always conjure up memories of the Huxtables. When Cosby was accused of sexual assault and misconduct by more than 50 women, Warner lamented what it meant for the legacy of The Cosby Show and its positive depiction of a Black family.
“That’s the thing that saddens me the most,” he told The Associated Press in 2015. “Because in a few generations the Huxtables will have been just a fairy tale.”
On the most recent episode of his podcast Not All Hood, which went up days before his death, Warner spoke about the challenges Black people continue to face in society, and recent efforts to de-emphasise the contributions made by Black soldiers.
“So everything that we have to muster, all of our resources, whether it be spiritual, whether it be relational, whether it be political to whatever extent,” he said, “everything that we have had to muster just to play on this playing field is what makes us rich as Black people, as Black culture.” – ©2025 The New York Times Company
