Sacha Baron Cohen concluded his comedy series Who Is America? yesterday (August 27), with an episode that saw him try to extract a murder confession from OJ Simpson. The former NFL player – who was released from prison last year after serving nine years for his role in an armed robbery – has been expected to appear on the show after rumours of a £15,000 payment to appear on-screen for Baron Cohen earlier this year.
In the episode, OJ sits down for an interview with Gio Monaldo, an alleged Italian billionaire playboy (actually Baron Cohen in prosthetics and a ponytail, ofc). Throughout the interview, the fake Italian playboy offers a large sum of money for a confession from Simpson about his infamous murder trial and says: “Me and you, we got something in common. We both, how you say, ‘ladykillers’.”
The British actor/comedian doesn’t get a confession, though; OJ only replies, “No, I didn’t kill anybody,” while laughing.
Conspicuously absent in Baron Cohen’s controversial show was his interview with Sarah Palin, which garnered a lot of press earlier this year after the former Republican vice-presidential candidate wrote on Facebook that she’d joined “a long list of American public personalities who have fallen victim to the evil, exploitive, sick ‘humor’ of the British ‘comedian’ Sacha Baron Cohen, enabled and sponsored by CBS/Showtime”.
The series has seen him trick figures across the American political spectrum, even prompting one Georgia lawmaker’s resignation.