The night Will Ferrell performed for the OJ Simpson jury
There will never again be a trial that captivates a television audience all over the world the way that the OJ Simpson trial did in the mid-1990s.
Sure, trials of famous people like Michael Jackson and Luigi Mangione will always attract the attention of people, but this was something entirely different. How could it not when the man at the centre of the trial was, mere years previously, one of the most beloved figures in American pop culture? He was a man deemed so nice that James Cameron declined to cast him as the title character in The Terminator because he didn’t think anyone would buy him as a killer.
How prophetic that statement would be, Cameron could never know at the time.
I mean, as if the trial wasn’t Hollywood-coded enough, it began with a literal car chase. One that attracted no less than 94 million live viewers on TV. In the lead-up to the Simpson trial beginning in earnest, the court had an absolute mountain to climb long before the trial itself began. They had to find jurors who had no idea about the case or anyone involved with it. Which is to say, jurors who’d never heard of one of the most famous sportsmen on the planet.
Somehow, they found an acceptable jury for the Simpson trial. However, they might have just had the worst time of anyone not being directly tried during the trial, as for a case as high-profile as this, the jury had to be sequestered. No one could contact them without the court’s watchful eye, and they were not allowed to watch television, read newspapers, or take in any other kind of media that could sway their opinion on the case itself. Which was basically any kind of media whatsoever.
This would be bad enough if it lasted a few weeks, but the Simpson trial went on for more than that. Quite a bit more than that, in fact. In total, the jury was sequestered for 265 days. For jurors, this meant ten whole months spent under armed guard, unable to keep track of anything else in the world, unable to work, unable to leave their place of residence, unable to even meet up with friends and family without those armed guards constantly surveying them.
At the height of the trial, there were genuine worries in the court that the jury was becoming despondent at the time spent away from their personal lives. Thus, a decision was made to do something to cheer them up, and the famed Los Angeles comedy troupe The Groundlings was brought in specifically to do a comedy show for them. Some of the biggest names in comedy were a part of the troupe at that time, like Chris Kattan, Jennifer Coolidge and Phil LaMarr.
However, chief among them was the group’s frontman, Will Ferrell, who has spoken about the experience as the single weirdest comedy gig he ever performed, understandably enough. If anything, the strangest part of the experience seems to have been, of all things, the location. According to the appearance of Ferrell on The Graham Norton Show, their sketch show was performed to the jury in the courtroom itself. They apparently went down pretty well, although understandably, the atmosphere was a little off.
A decade later, Ferrell had clearly come up with a better punchline for that story when asked about the experience on the Crimeless Podcast. After telling the same basic story, he’s asked on a scale of one to ten how they went down. Of course, he responds with the quip that he should have been using since the day after the performance.
Ferrell simply says, “We killed.”