The Naked Gun director explains why they only included one O.J. Simpson joke
O.J. Simpson portrayed Nordberg in the first three Naked Gun films, but just months after the release of Naked Gun 33⅓: The Final Insult… well, history took a turn. Now, with a new Naked Gun sequel on the way, audiences are curious to see how—or if—the film will acknowledge all that came after.
The first teaser trailer for The Naked Gun did feature one Nordberg mention, in which Frank Drebin Jr. (Liam Neeson), Ed Hocken Jr. (Paul Walter Hauser), and many more cops pay tearful tributes to their late parents, but when the camera moves to a picture of Simpson’s Nordberg, his son (Moses Jones) merely looks at the camera and shakes his head. According to director Akiva Schaffer, that’s the only O.J. Simpson gag in the movie.
“When I first told friends, ‘Hey, I’m actually about to write a Naked Gun,’ they’d go, ‘What are you going to do about O.J?’ So, right away, I was like, ‘Oh, right. That’s the elephant in the room that has to be addressed,’” Schaffer told THR. “The Hall of Legends scene that was in the teaser then answers everything. Is Frank going to be Frank Sr.? Is he going to be replacing Leslie Nielsen and trying to be Leslie Nielsen? No, he’s going to be Frank Jr., and it’s Liam. He’s going to lean into what he’s known for. How’s it going to look? What’s the music going to be like? It’s all right there, and it was all stuff that was written in the first week as we were asking ourselves those questions.“
Had the creative team known that the O.J. joke would get such a strong reaction, they may have included more, but Schaffer said they never wrote another. “We just went, ‘Yep, that takes care of that.’ That’s all it ever was,” he said. “I didn’t know that the joke would kill as hard as it did at our first test screening, and I was like, ‘Oh, it’s really good. This audience loves it.’ If I had known that, then maybe I would’ve written other jokes. I don’t know. But it already felt like it was pushing. You want to be respectful of everything that revolves around him, so it’s not something I really took glee in. We just had to acknowledge it in a way we thought was not dancing on anybody’s misfortunes.“
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The Naked Gun is now playing in theaters and earning rave reviews, which surprised (but gratified) me. In fact, our own Chris Bumbray said he had more fun watching this than anything in a long time. “Some might say The Naked Gun is stupid — and that’s exactly the point,” he wrote. “It’s stupid like a fox, and also really funny. It’s probably the best movie of its kind since Hot Shots: Part Deux, and honestly, I think I laughed more at this than I did watching The Naked Gun 33⅓: The Final Insult.” You can check out the rest of his review right here.
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