PASADENA, Calif. (AP) – Actor Cuba Gooding, Jr., who portrays O.J. Simpson in FX’s 10-part miniseries on the 1995 murder trial, said he didn’t want to meet the former football star as part of his research for taking on the role.
Gooding, who would not reveal at a news conference Saturday his opinion on whether Simpson stabbed his former wife Nicole and her friend Ronald Goldman to death in June 1994, said the Simpson he needed to portray in the television film was a much different man then, swaggering and confident.
“I had no desire to visit him in his present condition, being incarcerated and being a shell of a man,” he said. Gooding said he gained weight and it took him a month to recover from the grueling six-month filming.
The project, with executive producer Ryan Murphy and actors like John Travolta, David Schwimmer, Malcolm Jamal-Warner and Gooding, has been getting strong word-of-mouth before its Feb. 2 premiere. Based on a book by CNN’s Jeffrey Toobin, writers and producers said they worked hard to make the docudrama as authentic as possible.
Writers said they were interested in showing viewers how the seeming certainty of Simpson’s guilt in the wake of the killings unraveled during the trial.