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Sarah Paulson Opens Up About Meeting O.J. Simpson Prosecutor Marcia Clark: She Apologized ‘for the Hair’

Sarah Paulson, Marcia Clark
Sarah Paulson and Marcia Clark

Apology accepted! Sarah Paulson opened up to Us Weekly and other reporters about meeting with O.J. Simpson trial prosecutor Marcia Clark, who she plays in FX’s anthology series The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story. 

“She said some very nice things, but what was she supposed to say? What could she possibly have said to me?” Paulson, 41, said at FX Network’s 2016 Upfront in NYC on Wednesday, March 30. “I’m sure to her friends — I don’t know what she says to her friends — but to me she’s been incredibly kind and supportive and made me feel like I didn’t mess it up.”

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Clark, now 62, apparently had a sense of humor while meeting with Paulson. “The first thing she said to me when we sat down was, ‘I want to apologize for the hair,'” Paulson hilariously recalled. “And she meant as an actress. It was not going to be nothing for me to put the big sort of Chia Pet wig on my head and be on national television and all of that … I didn’t meet with her until we were almost done shooting, though. I’d already been wearing that wig long enough that it was like, ‘That’s a cold comfort, Marcia. Thanks for nothing.'”

Paulson continued of Clark today: “Her hair is straight and sleek and brown and wonderful.”

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On a more serious note, the Emmy winner addressed the sexism experienced by Clark during Simpson’s 1995 trial for the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman.

“What’s more mind-boggling is how I as a woman and many women that I knew at the time — though I was only 19, but women who were older than that — nobody rallied around Marcia,” Paulson admitted. “She was sort of collectively abandoned by her people, you know, and she didn’t really have a lot of support from other female attorneys or just women in general, and that, I think, is a great shame and that is the thing that I think of more when I read that episode and I thought, ‘This is just harrowing. I don’t know how she did it.’ I really don’t know how she got up in the morning.”

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Clark made headlines this week after giving a candid interview to The Hollywood Reporter about her life before and after the trial of the century. “There was some form of depression going on, but I wasn’t aware of it at the time,” Clark told the mag of her state of mind at the time. “I was very torn up. Everything I believed in was shredded.”

Clark has a pal now in Paulson. “Episode 6, the ‘Marcia Marcia Marcia’ episode, was hard to do,” Paulson told Us and reporters on Wednesday. “I sort of had a lump in my throat doing it and also my blood was boiling. I was just so angry. I couldn’t believe that she was having to deal with it and that she was also, you know, still getting up in the morning and feeding her children and going to work. You know, there were press and paparazzi parked on her lawn … She had no gate or front wall and people were just sleeping on her front porch practically, so it was just an incredibly terrible, harrowing time for her.”

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