The first trailer for Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette was released on Monday, giving viewers a full look at the recreation of the highly scrutinized, tragic romance between the son of America’s most popular president and a then-unknown fashion director.
JFK Jr., 38, and Bessette, 33, began their star-crossed relationship at a New York City Calvin Klein fitting room in 1992. Before the decade was up, the the newly-wed Kennedy’s had died in a private plane crash in which JFK Jr. was piloting. It was the end of a bright and brief relationship ignited by the media’s ravenous appetite.
In the trailer for Love Story, Emmy-winning director Ryan Murphy, 60, is keen to unpack the media’s role in the stories it covers.
“Every story needs an angle. A happy couple doesn’t sell papers,” Bessette’s sister, Lauren (Sydney Lemmon), warns her in the new footage.
Throughout their tumultuous relationship, the Kennedys became the subject of intense media scrutiny, for their impeccable style and impassioned blowups—including a highly publicised argument in New York City’s Washington Square Park.
This argument and the couple’s courtship are the subject of Murphy’s Love Story—the fifth installment of his American Story anthology. The Glee director has recreated some of America’s most notorious media stories, including the trials of OJ Simpson and Aaron Hernandez, the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, and the unsolved Black Dahlia case.
Much of the trailer depicts Bessette, who Vanity Fair dubbed “The Private Princess” upon her death, struggling to reconcile her new celebrity status.
“They won’t leave us alone,” Bessette (Sarah Pidgeon) wails to her husband about the media attention.
And while Murphy seems keen to unravel the media’s involvement in the couple’s doomed relationship, the trailer depicts a show that participates in it as much as it studies.
The trailer revels in the lavishness of the Kennedy Compound, the family’s multi-acre beachfront mansion in Cape Cod, the fashionable beauty of its central characters, Bessette and Kennedy, and their notable media flare-ups. Going as far as to recreate the flare-ups with period-specific camera equipment.
The show has already come under criticism for historical inaccuracies, including Bassette’s hair color, which her real-world stylist, Brad Johns, described to Vogue as unbelievable, saying it was “too 2024.”
What the trailer does show, however, is that Murphy nailed the casting of JFK Jr. and Bessette. The showrunner dug deep into the Hollywood acting pool to find relative unknowns Paul Anthony Kelly and Sarah Pidgeon to play the titular couple. In every scene, they appear impossibly similar to their real-life counterparts.
Fervor for more of the private couple’s less-than-private life has yet to diminish, a quarter century after their deaths.
In August, CNN released a three-part docuseries on the “American Prince,” exploring Kennedy’s early ascent to celebrity status. It remains to be seen how Murphy intends to add to the library of material on the short-lived Kennedy couple.
The limited series will premiere on February 12 on FX, available to stream on Hulu.
