Cobie Smulders will be Impeachment: American Crime Story's Ann Coulter following Betty Gilpin's exit

How I Met Your Mother’s Cobie Smulders will now play media pundit Ann Coulter in Ryan Murphy’s Impeachment: American Crime Story. GLOW star Betty Gilpin stepped down from the role due to pandemic-related schedule complications. Back in June, Glipin shared her dismay at never getting to use her long-crafted Coulter impression.

“This is another COVID disappointment. I was supposed to play Ann Coulter in American Crime Story, the Monica Lewisnky story. Because of COVID the schedule didn’t work,” she said on Jimmy Kimmel Live. “The big disappointment was that I had spent a year listening to Ann Coulter audio books in the car to get her voice down.” Poor woman.

Coulter has been sucking the life force out of Americans in political spheres for 30 years now, but her media career started during Bill Clinton’s presidency. She was a loud voice for his impeachment, which was the subject of her first book, 1998’s High Crimes And Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton. The book is based off her time investigating of Paula Jones’s sexual-harassment suit against Clinton.

Yesterday, FX shared the first look at Beanie Feldstein as 22-year-old White House intern Monica Lewinsky on her way to see the president. Other cast members building out the drama are Edie Falco as Hillary Clinton, Billy Eichner as conservative journalist Matt Drudge, Sarah Paulson as Linda Tripp, and Clive Owen as Bill Clinton. Much of the narrative from Impeachment is based on former New Yorker writer Jeffrey Toobin’s book A Vast Conspiracy: The Real Story Of The Sex Scandal That Nearly Brought Down a President. (Since Impeachment was first announced, and then re-announced, Toobin was embroiled in his own scandal involving sexual misconduct in the workplace.) However, Murphy has said that Lewinsky herself, who’s a producer on this season, has been involved with every script.

The second season of American Crime Story, which focused on the assassination of Gianni Versace, received a much more subdued response than the first season, The People V. OJ Simpson, which brought another ’90s cultural moment to the forefront of public discourse. Since The Assassination Of Gianni Versace wrapped up in March of 2018, the series has struggled with its third season amidst a pandemic and ever-changing subject ideas.

It’s been a long wait for the third installment of American Crime Story, but Impeachment is finally set to premiere on September 7.