Hey, remember the cop who said a bunch of racist stuff, raising questions of whether he could be relied upon to fairly investigate a crime whose primary suspect was black? You may be asking, “Which one?” in response to this hypothetical question, which is fair. Specifically, we’re referring to Mark Fuhrman, the LAPD detective who was convicted of perjury after testifying in the murder trial of O.J. Simpson in 1995. During the course of his testimony, Fuhrman’s fondness for a word that rhymes with “trigger” emerged, as well as allegations that Fuhrman had planted a bloody glove on Simpson’s property—directly leading to Johnnie Cochran’s famous “if it doesn’t fit, you must acquit” defense, and thus, indirectly, to the Chewbacca Defense.
Well, for better or for worse, this potentially inflammatory character is now in the hands of Ryan Murphy. The New York Post reports that The Good Wife and Rescue Me actor Steven Pasquale has been cast as Fuhrman on American Crime Story, Murphy’s upcoming FX anthology series about the Simpson trial. Pasquale joins a cast that already includes Cuba Gooding, Jr. as O.J. Simpson, David Schwimmer as Robert Kardashian, John Travolta as Robert Shapiro, Courtney B. Vance as Johnnie Cochran, and Selma Blair as Kris Jenner, among other real-life personalities ’90s kids probably only dimly remember, because they were children at the time.