Malcolm-Jamal Warner's Friend Shares BTS Photos From His Personal Life

Malcolm-Jamal Warner’s friend Candace Kelley is looking back on her fond memories and moments with the late star.

“On average, Malcolm and I would text every other day and speak once or twice a week,” Kelley exclusively told Us Weekly of Warner on Wednesday, July 23.

The pair, who became friends two years ago, cohosted their podcast “Not All Hood” together. While they were colleagues, the duo formed a friendship outside of the studio.

“I know about the pipe that busted in his house, and he knows what I just had for lunch,” she explained. “It’s like those little things, [when] you’re really, really involved in someone’s life, more than just a working relationship.”

Kelley shared that she and Warner spoke days before his death. (The actor died on Sunday, July 20, after drowning while in Costa Rica. He was 54.)

“I spoke to him on Friday before he left … he wrote me this long, five-paragraph email from the plane, which is so strange. I’m like ‘[You’re going to] Costa Rica,’” she told Us. “But now that I’m going back to reading it, I’m very glad he did.”

In one conversation, Kelley and Warner were discussing plans to record a live show for their podcast, which was set to have Isaac Hayes III as a guest.

As a close confidant, Kelley got to know a side of Warner that the public didn’t see: a doting father. (Warner and his wife shared a daughter. Their identities have not been publicly revealed.)

“This was the guy who’s like, ‘I gotta go. My daughter’s got her big party,’” Kelley recalled. “He wasn’t Malcolm. He was just dad, a simple welcoming committee beholden to her.”

While Warner kept his family out of the spotlight, Kelley got the pleasure of getting to know his wife and daughter.

“After a while, we talked so much like we’re all family at this point. [His] daughter would come in, and she would render a drawing here and there of all of us on Zoom, and then she would present the drawing,” she reflected. “He would be so excited and so proud.”

Kelley added that Warner’s family was “the light of his life.”

In addition to getting to know Warner as a person, Kelley also saw the impact he made on the Black community thanks to his groundbreaking role as Theo Huxtable on The Cosby Show.

“When we would go out, you would think that The Cosby Show was on today,” she told Us. “It was not only just, ‘Oh, my goodness, oh, can I have a picture?’ It was, ‘Let me explain to you the impact that you had on my life, because I saw you in myself, and I’d never seen a Black guy on TV like that ever.’ So there was a lot of that, a lot of tears, excitement and joy, because these were people who were proud of him too.”

Kelley added that Warner continued to carry a “torch” for uplifting members of his community.

“That is why you’re not going to see him [in roles] as a drug dealer, a rapist. There are parts he would turn down,” she said. “He had a serious commitment to his community and to his family and to his own personal legacy of what was right from wrong, to make sure that the tropes of Black people that have been out there that he used his power to stamp them out.”

That philosophy was one of the inspirations for Kelley and Warner’s podcast.

“Forty-seven million Black folks in America, all the stories are not the same. We are not a monolith. Let’s go hear some of those stories, besides the ones that we consistently see represented on TV,” she said of her and Warner’s objective. “There’s a stronghold of the type of drama series, specifically, that looks pretty much the same — gangsters, drug dealers, and they’re very well-written, don’t get me wrong — and we’ve had this conversation, but it was a big no to him. He said, ‘We could do a lot better.’”

Kelley and the “Not All Hood” team are putting on an event Friday, July 25, to honor Warner’s legacy, aptly named “Malcolm Left the Mic On.”

“So many people have been pouring in, and they just want to share how he affected their lives,” she told Us. “We do have a line of celebrities lined up, like someone from The Resident and Erika Alexander … but mostly we’re hearing from the community.”