It was a swing and a miss for Sacha Baron Cohen’s Who Is America? finale last year, when the comedian, deep in character as a randy Italian billionaire, met O.J. Simpson for a “business opportunity†in an attempt to get a murder confession out of him. It didn’t happen, despite Cohen’s valiant attempts (Simpson mostly laughed off the death jokes), which were also aided by FBI training he requested, and received, prior to the interview. “I had an absurdly ambitious aim. I did try. So I trained up with an FBI interrogator,†Cohen said in a new THR roundtable. “Again, this is reaching too high, but I thought, ‘Let me try it,’ because it was hidden camera — if he’s ever going to admit it, it would be in a hotel room where he thinks he’s going to earn a lot of money. I trained with supposedly the greatest FBI interrogator, and eventually he goes, ‘Who’s this for?’ And I go, ‘It’s for O.J.’ And he goes, ‘That’s going to be tough.’â€
Cohen added that the interrogator was still very helpful, and he even shared some trade secrets. “The FBI have a way with people who are finding it hard to confess,†Cohen said. “There was a sequence that I memorized.†What that sequence is, we’ll never know, so we’ll pretend it sounds like my wiiiiiife.