How did Cuba Gooding Jr. Approach Playing OJ Simpson?

“One hundred million people watched that Bronco chase and 100 million people watched the verdict”, said Brad Simpson at the recent TCA Winter Press Tour, one of the executive producers along with creator Ryan Murphy.

The highly-anticipated upcoming FX mini-series, “The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story”, has been receiving national attention and critical acclaim.

LOS ANGELES — In October 1995, Courtney B. Vance and Tony Goldwyn took a break from filming a TV movie in Toronto to watch news coverage of the riveting end to a Los Angeles drama: O.J. Simpson was not guilty of murder, a jury declared.

“But at the same time let us not forget these 70-year-old white men we are talking about were rebels in their time so have more progressive thinking than we do, but as a collective you can only choose from the pool from which you can draw from for your nominations so I’m not here to make any excuse for any ills in the academy voting process”.

The so-called trial of the century, which proved at once gaudy and racially revealing, and what led to the verdict are dramatized in “The People v. O.J. Simpson”, FX’s 10-part series debuting 10 p.m. EST Tuesday. He spoke with Entertainment Weekly about his eventual desire to take on the role of one of O.J. Simpsons defense attorneys, Robert Shapiro, in The People V. O.J. Simpson. The series stars Cuba Gooding Jr as O.J. Simpson, Sarah Paulson as Marcia Clark, David Schwimmer as Robert Kardashian, and John Travolta as Robert Shapiro.

“I wasn’t cheering for O.J. It wasn’t about O.J.at all….”

“The O.J. case has now assumed the same status as the Kennedy assassination”, said David Schmid, an English professor at the State University of NY at Buffalo, and editor of the 2015 book Violence in American Popular Culture. And thats what African-Americans were cheering about, ” Vance said.

“She didn’t understand what the case was about”, says Vance.

“I didn’t know. I was like, maybe he didn’t, because they didn’t find him guilty”. He has been in a Nevada prison since 2008 on a robbery and kidnapping conviction. “‘I think I had a nervous breakdown during lunch.’ And he laughed”.

That line crystallized for many observers Cochran’s sense of theatricality, which made some love him and some hate him – and everyone acknowledge his skill.

Gooding recalled that he was watching the 1994 NBA Finals when a news broadcast cut into the game showing police chasing after Simpson’s white Bronco down the freeway. It was then the job of screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski to translate it into a script.

“That [scene] was really- it was very emotional”, Schwimmer said.

The drama meshed with how both approach their work, Vance said, setting a standard and refusing to “do everything and anything, even though financially it hurts us sometime”.

The producers have said they purposefully did not reach out to anyone who was involved in the case, basing the series on court transcripts and Jeffrey Toobin’s 1996 book The Run of His Life: The People v. O.J. Simpson. It is a dramatization of the controversial titular trial that shook America for decades. Vance agrees, but quotes Martin Luther King Jr.to strike a hopeful note.“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice, ” Vance said.