For people of a certain generation, there are few higher compliments than telling a person they look like John F. Kennedy Jr. or Carolyn Bessette Kennedy.
He was coronated not just America’s Prince but Sexiest Man Alive, the epitome of ’90s handsomeness with that New England jawline, looking as if it was chiseled by the waves of Cape Cod Bay, and the tufts of chest hair he was never shy about showing off to the paparazzi. And she was the epitome of New York cool, the fashion It Girl, Calvin Klein muse, and Carrie Bradshaw prototype who stormed Camelot with her chicness.
Paul Anthony Kelly and Sarah Pidgeon, the attractive young stars cast to play John and Carolyn in Ryan Murphy’s new series Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette, blush when this is brought up.
“It’s a pretty good one,” Kelly says, his sheepish grin channeling John even now as we speak. “I mean…just look at him,” Pidgeon says, making a grand gesture at the tall drink of water sitting next to her during one of their press days for the show.
Pidgeon, 29, a Tony nominee for her role in the rock-and-roll play Stereophonic, gets her first leading role as Carolyn, after a string of supporting TV parts. Kelly, 37, mostly worked as a model until, shortly before filming began—and having auditioned over 1,000 actors to no avail—Murphy discovered him. After a chemistry read with Pidgeon, Murphy immediately gave Kelly the part.
Love Story chronicles what is, tragically, the totality of the Kennedys’ romance.
The series shows their meet-cute and swoon-inducing game of romantic cat-and-mouse: he was beguiled by her, and she cautiously kept him at bay. As they fall in love and come out as a couple, the vultures circle. The paparazzi stalk their every move—and, as the pressure of that mounts, their every fight—while the public picks apart Carolyn for all the ways she is or isn’t good for their beloved John. They are exalted and vilified in equal measure, often on the same day, as the news cycles surrounding their relationship whip into a whirling tornado of frenzy. And then, as they’re reconciling with their roles as public figures with public responsibility, their lives are taken in a devastating plane crash.
It’s not just a love story; it’s a veritable opera: a truly American tale of romance and tragedy. And that was on the minds of the production team, including Brad Simpson, Nina Jacobson, and Connor Hines, who spoke with the Obsessed about the show, along with Kelly and Pidgeon.
Originally, the series was going to be titled American Love Story, in line with the suite of other anthology series—American Crime Story, American Sports Story—that Murphy has produced.
“We’ve changed it to Love Story because it really felt like, in this moment where there’s so much division and where everything is so cynical, it would be great to start doing something that was very sincere,” Simpson says. “Something that everyone could relate to, which is about what it’s like to fall in love and what it’s like to then deal with entering into relationships with the families, the people you fall in love with, and the tensions in a relationship and in a marriage—but do it on a massive scale.”
With various intangible things swirling in the air, culturally speaking—a nostalgia for the ’90s that this writer can’t believe is happening, a noticeable spike in horniness—the timing for a show like this seemed right.
“I do think right now, between Heated Rivalry and Wuthering Heights coming out, I think it’s a sign that people maybe want to sit, curl up, and watch a great love story,” Jacobson says. “This one has a steamy love story and a tragic love story. Really, it’s a story about two people who did love each other and struggled, but on this massive stage.”
It’s the misconceptions that come with that massive stage that everyone was eager to dispel with this show, and the opportunity to delve deeper into these two people who have become mythological figures in their own right. Before and after every paparazzi snap, there were things happening behind closed doors that explain who these people are and lend context to those moments. Love Story, in that way, is an endeavor to properly annotate this sweeping romance.
As much as she found slinking around in Carolyn’s voguish dresses and wielding her long mane of hair almost as a prop to be a thrill, Pidgeon’s excitement was to show Carolyn “beyond her physical form,” she says. “She’s funny. She’s smart. She’s very witty. She’s ambitious. She’s sensitive.”
“There are so many two-dimensional images of her, and she’s seen as this paragon of beauty and minimalist fashion, but she’s so exuberant,” she continues. “And I think it also goes to show just how intelligent she was in terms of her minimalist fashion, but there’s something sort of enigmatic about her. It’s that energy that imbues all of these incredible clothes. That playfulness was something that made me feel like I was getting closer to Carolyn.”
So much of the coverage of Carolyn at the time framed her as an ice queen and standoffish, because she recoiled at how obtrusive and aggressive paparazzi and tabloid reporters were. She didn’t seem interested in “playing the game,” giving us access to her life that we felt entitled to because of how personal we felt our connections to the Kennedys were.
Love Story is an attempt to reframe that.
“I think the way she presents in images for somebody who is apprehensive about fame, she feels standoffish because she’s nervous, and obviously, this is all new to her,” Hines says. “But the woman that we read about and got to know through our research was so funny and vivacious and smart and passionate and driven. I kind of couldn’t believe the contrast between the persona people knew her as and the woman we were reading about. This was somebody who was so full of life, but when documented, was obviously quite scared. I think illustrating that contrast was critical.”
It was equally important to bring John back to the ground from the pedestal that so many people had put him on, to dim the blinding spotlight that followed him around like a halo, so that we could really see what he’s like as a human.
This is a person who was heralded as the Sexiest Man Alive at the same time newspapers were posting his bar exam scores with the headline “The Hunk Flunks.”
“John was somebody who wrestled with those personas,” Hines says. “I think he felt like somebody who wasn’t always taken seriously. His looks and charm were a currency he thought people valued, because, I mean, his high school report cards were published. It’s an incredibly difficult life, especially when you are burdened by the expectations of a Kennedy.”
“He just wanted to be a regular guy, and he couldn’t,” Kelly says. “That was his greatest desire, really. He had this everyman quality to him, which made everyone feel as if they’re the only person in the world.”
It’s hard not to have a visceral reaction to the opening sequence of Love Story, as most audience members will know this is also a death story. The series begins with John and Carolyn separately making their way to the airport, where John will fly them to a family wedding they will never make it to. The plane would crash off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard, killing them both, as well as Carolyn’s sister, Lauren, who was also on board.
It’s a tough balance to strike: satisfying audience curiosity over the fatal accidents while not exploiting the tragedy for television drama.
“Ghoulish is the last thing that we wanted to be,” Jacobson says. “So much of what was written about them, and especially about her, was deeply misogynistic, like so overtly misogynistic. You have a person who’s so photographed and so known, and yet utterly unseen. You can hardly find anything of her actual voice, of her speaking, because she didn’t want to step into the limelight and be a spokesperson; she didn’t know what the next phase of her life was gonna be or what she had to say.
“She felt like she was already, by marrying him, more famous than she deserved to be anyway. So I think that for us, being able to give dimension to both of them, to her, and to bring them to life was much more important to us than to dwell on the manner of their death.”
In a way, Love Story—and the relationship between John and Carolyn, and John and Carolyn and all of us—is a cautionary tale. As Jacobson points out, they are “incredible precursors to what we now recognize as these parasocial relationships and how suffocating they can be for the people inside of them, and how timely that is.”
In the ’90s, paparazzi cameras and intrusive tabloid reporters were the offenders. Now, it’s a different iteration of the same problem, exacerbated by a population armed with their phones, constantly recording, constantly posting, constantly judging.
“In a time where so many people long for fame and long for notoriety, it felt like a much more interesting way to approach the story to explore that. That is not the dream, actually. For them and their relationship, it’s the nightmare.”
