This week’s episode of The People V. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story, the eighth of the series’ 10-episode limited run, focused on this jury. It was great. After eight months sequestered in a hotel together, the jurors were fighting about watching Martin or Seinfeld (“What is a Seinfeld?”), and starting drama over who got more time to shop at Ross, and freaking all the way out during breakfast and trying to make a run for it. Some of them got sent home. The Demon was promoted from alternate. You should really be watching this show.
Vulture ran a piece yesterday about how the series cast its jury, and the difficulties of finding extras who wanted to commit to four months of work. It’s a fun little look at the behind-the-scenes part of the show, and even if that’s all it was, that would have been fine. But then we get to this part…
They also inadvertently cast an actress who had worked with the actual O.J. Simpson: Susan Beaubian, who plays madam foreman Armanda Cooley, starred as Mrs. Nordberg, wife of O.J. Simpson’s Nordberg in the 1988 Naked Gun movie.
Wait. Hang on. The jury foreman was O.J.’s wife in The Naked Gun? The jury foreman was Mrs. Nordberg?!
Yup, she sure was! And she also played Lisa Turtle’s mom on Saved by the Bell, not that that has anything to do with anything beyond me scrolling down her IMDb page and letting out an audible “Whoa.” This is all… it’s kind of weird, right? Part of me hopes reality and fiction get blurred beyond recognition next week and Judge Ito starts grilling her in his chambers like, “Ms. Cooley, I need you to be very honest with me here. Did you play Mrs. Nordberg in The Naked Gun? Because if so, I’ll be forced to dismiss you.”
Susan Beaubian isn’t the only member of the cast who has a previous acting relationship with O.J. Simpson, either. As we discussed last week, Evan Handler, who plays Simpson lawyer Alan Dershowitz on the show, starred with O.J. as a beach bum former Navy SEAL in the scrapped NBC pilot Frogmen, a show with the actual tagline, “Real killers. Killer waves.”
There are layers at play here.
