Only four of the ten episodes of FX’s American Crime Story: The People v. O.J. Simpson have aired, and yet we must face something bleak: Connie Britton, who plays the morally corrupt Faye Resnick just as her morally corruptness was becoming clear to America, will not appear in any more of the series.
This is, frankly, artistically heartbreaking: Britton has magically slunk, slurred and lowered her lids through brief appearances so far, but, as she told Vulture today, last night’s episode was the last we’ll see of her:
That’s the end of Faye, yeah. When we were shooting it, some of the writers would come up and be like, “We need more Faye, we need more Faye,” but the truth of the matter is we have to stay focused on what the story is, and once the Larry King interview happened, Faye did not really figure that prominently in the case anymore. Unfortunately, that was all we get.
The Larry King interview in question is an interview Resnick did promoting her juicy and lurid book Nicole Brown Simpson: The Private Diary of a Life Interrupted, which threw a wrench in the plans of both the prosecution and the defense; in last night’s episode, which takes place in October of 1994, Judge Ito expresses his concern that the revelations in the book could affect jury selection. (To complete the circle, Britton appeared on Larry King herself in August to discuss him playing himself and her playing Faye on the series.)
Here’s a different Larry King interview, from 1996, where Resnick (who is much more lucid than Britton’s performance suggests she was, having apparently kicked her infamous drug habit) again defends the book, but says looking back she would have taken “much more time with it and would have made it more delicate.”
While Ito was, as the LA Times noted at the time, most concerned with how the depictions of O.J. and Nicole’s relationship could sway the jury to one side or the other, the stuff that got people really talking was Resnick’s descriptions of her and Nicole partying, doing drugs, hooking up with one another, and, infamously, Nicole’s love of giving “a Brentwood Hello”—a.k.a. a really good blowjob. From a Philadelphia Inquirer article at the time:
The two best friends’ favorite social activity was going to clubs, dancing with each other, and driving the men crazy. There is a name for such behavior, unprintable in this space.
As Resnick, Connie Britton was a joy to watch, drinking martinis, chain-smoking, and describing her dead best friend in not altogether flattering terms. She’ll be missed, especially as that version of Faye seems to be gone, living on only in incredibly stilted conversations on this season of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.
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