‘Naked Gun’ Creators Wrestled With How to Handle ‘Elephant in the Room’: O.J. Simpson

"What are you going to do about O.J?”

Akiva Schaffer, Lonely Island comedian and director of the Naked Gun reboot, told The Hollywood Reporter that it was the first question everyone asked him about bringing Leslie Nielsen’s comedy franchise back to life. How would he handle the original’s Nordberg, the perpetually maimed partner of Lt. Frank Drebin, now that O.J. Simpson had done an all-time heel turn in the real world?

Schaffer didn’t want to use the new Naked Gun to glorify Simpson, but ignoring the character felt like a miss as well. He and his writing team solved the problem by writing a scene with a Police Squad Hall of Fame. Sons of the fallen cops weep in front of their portraits, except for Nordberg Jr., who simply stares at his dad’s picture. Actor Moses Jones turns to the camera and shakes his head no. With a grunt, O.J. and Nordberg are dismissed from the rest of the movie.

“To be honest, we never wrote another O.J. joke,” Schaffer said. “We just went, ‘Yep, that takes care of that. I didn’t know that the joke would kill as hard as it did at our first test screening. If I had known that, then maybe I would’ve written other jokes.”

Or maybe not. How do you be respectful of the character while not glorifying the actor? “It’s not something I really took glee in,” he said. “We just had to acknowledge it in a way we thought was not dancing on anybody’s misfortunes.”

Schaffer admits that if Seth MacFarlane or the movie studio had come to him earlier and asked what he thought about rebooting the comedy franchise, he’d have dismissed the idea. “I would’ve been like, ‘Of course not. The first Naked Gun is so good, and there’s no room to make it better. You can only do different.”

But the idea of stony-faced Liam Neeson as Frank Drebin Jr. gave Schaffer pause. His real-time reaction to the casting (which came well before Schaffer was brought on as director): “Ooh, that’s a good idea.”

Casting Neeson’s love interest was more difficult. “Spoof is not an easy skill,” Schaffer said. “You could be an Oscar-winning actor, and you could be terrible at spoof.”

But he says Pamela Anderson brought the same qualities to the table as Priscilla Presley, the love interest in the original run of Naked Gun films. “She can say the UCLA joke with a little twinkle in her eye, and you really believe the character is playing at the height of her intelligence,” he explained. “The character has no clue that what she’s saying is not the right thing to say.” 

As for the Nordberg character, Schaffer and the film’s creators decided it was best not to have him say anything at all.