WHERE O.J. ACTORS WERE DURING THE TRIAL

The trial stretched from November 1994 to October 1995. What were the stars of The People v. O.J. Simpson doing at the time?

John Travolta (Robert Shapiro)

“I was in the middle of a Pulp Fiction resurrection,” says Travolta. “I had a new career. I was happy.” Pulp Fiction had just won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival as the trial began. Travolta’s father, who was a football coach, was obsessed with the case. “So I had my dad at the sofa watching every second of it, from the car chase on.”

Cuba Gooding, Jr. (O.J. Simpson)

Gooding was shooting As Good as it Gets with Jack Nicholson, but he was about to achieve fame for shouting “Show me the money!” as an NFL football player in Cameron Crowe’s Jerry Maguire.

Sarah Paulson (Marcia Clark)

Paulson had just landed her first regular TV gig — as a ghost — on the short-lived horror series American Gothic. What she remembers more than the verdict was watching the White Bronco chase. “I was 19, I think. I was at my friend’s house in Brooklyn. We were watching some other show and this damn Bronco thing — we knew O.J. from the Naked Gun movies; we were not football people, we were girls in high school.”

Courtney B. Vance (Johnnie Cochran)

Vance was in Toronto shooting the TV movie The Boys Next Door with Scandal star Tony Goldwyn when the verdict came down. “I cheered,” Vance told a reporter. Goldwyn screamed “No!” The two were puzzled by each other’s responses to the acquittal. Their reactions, split across racial lines, were happening in homes and offices across North America.

David Schwimmer (Robert Kardashian)

“I was living in L.A., so I was very aware of the tension here,” says Schwimmer, whose run on Friends began just as the O.J. trial got underway. “You could feel it. It was palpable in the city. And then this crazy thing of a career break of a lifetime happened.”