Terry Crews lost his job on national television.

Well, five minutes before he went on national television, to be exact.

The actor, who held a variety of TV and film roles before landing a gig as Sergeant Terry Jeffords on the police comedy Brooklyn Nine-Nine, was sitting in a dressing room in New York City in May preparing to appear on a game show.

He received an email alert on his phone. It was Dan Goor, the former writer for Parks & Recreation and the co-creator of Brooklyn Nine-Nine. Goor was writing to tell his staff that Fox had cancelled their show.

"And then five minutes later, I am on TV, in front of millions, and I am going, uh..." Crews tells the ABC.

Terry Crews (right) plays Terry Jeffords, a sensitive, highly strung sergeant with a penchant for yoghurt. ( IMDB )

"They are like 'from Brooklyn Nine Nine, Terry Crews' and I am like Oh my God. I didn't know what to say, I didn't know what to do. It was just this surreal experience.

"The only thing I can really relate it to is if somebody told you your pet got ran over."

What happened next? The internet, of course.

The show's cancellation trended across the globe. Fans shared their favourite scenes and quotes. News websites published loving tributes. The internet, Crews says, "was telling us just how much they loved us".

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It didn't work, at least not initially.

Network after network declined to pick the show up for a sixth season. Crews, exhausted, went to sleep, but was soon woken by a buzzing phone at his bedside. NBC had decided to embrace the fanfare and commission a new season.

In the parlance of the sitcom's detectives: Nine-Nine!

"What a whirlwind," Crews says.

The time from cancelled to uncancelled was 31 hours.

"In the end it was like someone told you, 'No, no, that wasn't your dog, that was someone else's dog! Your dog is alive! Your dog is alive!"

This was not the only flashpoint for Crews in 2018

The drama over his job came towards the end of a challenging 12 months for Crews, who grew up in Michigan and played in the NFL before landing acting gigs in the TV series Everybody Hates Chris and the films Friday After Next and Idiocracy.

In October last year, Crews became the most high-profile male entertainment industry figure to reveal, as part of the #metoo movement, his experience of being sexually assaulted.

In 2016, he was grabbed on the crotch at a party by Adam Venit, a powerful Hollywood talent agent to stars like Adam Sandler and Eddie Murphy. Crews' wife Rebecca was standing next to him at the time.

Crews decided to speak publicly about the incident a week after the Harvey Weinstein allegations put sexual misconduct in the headlines, saying the news was "giving [him] PTSD".

He complained to Venit's employer, and sued it and the agent. He received an apology from Venit, who later left his position at the agency, William Morris Endeavour, and the suit was settled.

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A year on, how does Crews view his experience, particularly as it compared to those of the many women who were going public with their own allegations at the time?

"First of all, I was believed immediately," Crews says.

"You can go through the most high-profile cases, from Harvey Weinstein to Bill Cosby, all the way up to the President of the United States.

"Most of these women have to go on and on, and tell the story over and over and over, to get someone [to believe them]. And then you have to have probably 10 more women to come forward in order for the first person to be believed.

"When I came out, immediately everybody was like 'OK, we believe you Terry', right away. I think it shouldn't be that way."

Crews says his decision to go public, as a muscular, 100-kilogram-plus former football player, made it easier for other men to talk about their experiences of sexual assault.

"Even if they were going through their own personal hell, they would feel like less of a man if they ever said anything," Crews says of the common thinking at the time.

"The more I [spoke out], the more men began to tell their own stories."

Crews says men need to be in touch with their feelings — like Sergeant Terry Jeffords

Crews is advocating for men to tell their own stories of sexual assault and harassment because, he says, it leads to an unburdening that will break down toxic forms of masculinity.

Men should be, in a sense, more like his character Sergeant Terry Jeffords, who never hides his love for his wife and three daughters and, early in the chronology of Brooklyn Nine-Nine, reveals his anxiety about returning to the field after a dangerous assignment.

Terry Crews says he didn't retaliate when assaulted out of fear of losing work. ( Supplied: Fremulon )

Outside of acting, Crews now speaks on the topic of masculinity, even appearing before a US Senate hearing in June. He tells men they don't have to accept the popular construct of what a man should be — "this emotionless robot who can do anything".

"Because all of that is not true," he says.

"When I look at what's going on in America, a lot of things with gun violence and the #metoo movement, it is usually with guys that have never, ever dealt with the issues in the right way and they just got so bad to the point where now we are hearing about it," he says.

"If we could help people, or at least have the chance to get to these people way before this point, there's a lot of problems that would be nipped in the bud immediately."

Brooklyn Nine-Nine returns to SBS VICELAND on January 11.