If Courtney B. Vance plays Johnnie Cochran on American Crime Story, you must acquit

By Sam Barsanti | February 6, 2015 | 3:01am

Aux Features TV

If Courtney B. Vance plays Johnnie Cochran on American Crime Story, you must acquit

Introducing Endless Mode: A New Games & Anime Site from Paste

Read our announcement | See the 10 Best Games of 2025 (So Far)

Other than maybe Abraham Lincoln, Johnnie Cochran has to be the most famous lawyer in the history of the world. Lincoln wasn’t famous for being a lawyer, though, so we’d have to give Cochran the edge anyway. He probably did all sorts of things before and after the O.J. Simpson trial, but it’s his work on Simpson’s defense team that basically defined courtroom drama for the last couple decades—and it’s mostly because of a certain rhyming phrase. Not to mention the fact that Simpson totally did it and Cochran got him acquitted.

Now, with FX and Ryan Murphy launching their new anthology series—American Crime Story—with a season about the O.J. Simpson trial, they’ve needed to find somebody appropriately flashy to play Cochran. According to The Hollywood Reporter, they’ve found that somebody in State Of Affairs’ Courtney B. Vance. It seems like a surprising choice for American Crime Story, since the rest of its major roles are being played by big-name celebrities (Cuba Gooding Jr. is Simpson, David Schwimmer is Robert Kardashian, and John Travolta is Robert Shapiro) but maybe Vance impressed everybody at his audition with some snappy phrase that stuck in their heads and made them forget about all of the prior evidence—err, auditions.