No one can know for sure what role John F. Kennedy, Jr. and Carolyn Bessette would’ve played in today’s political world, but the actors portraying them think they might have an idea.
“Maybe she would run for president,” Sarah Pidgeon, who plays Bessette in Love Story, speculated about her real-life counterpart on Obsessed: The Podcast.
In FX’s new Ryan Murphy-led series, Pidgeon and her co-star, Paul Anthony Kelly, reimagine the private lives of the late 20th century’s most scrutinized couple.
“Who knows if John would’ve followed political aspirations, if Carolyn would’ve gone back into some sort of fashion PR space,” Pidgeon, 29, added.
The couple garnered immense media coverage for their passionate, if not turbulent, relationship before their untimely death in a plane accident in 1999, just three years into their marriage.
“It’s hard to speculate what they would still be doing,” Kelly, 37, said. “I think a political thing is kind of inevitable.”
President John F. Kennedy’s namesake son, 38, who was born just two weeks after his father’s election victory, had yet to launch a political career at the time of his death. In the 1990s, JFK Jr. founded George, a political lifestyle magazine, and served as an assistant district attorney in New York.
Bessette, 33, was a fashion publicist for Calvin Klein, where she met her future husband. The pair became equally known for their effortless, chic fashion sensibilities, which further catapulted them into the spotlight.
“I believe their love was incredibly strong,” Pidgeon added. “So I’d like to think that it would still be strong today.”
In the same interview, the actors discussed the joys of recreating the couple’s famous photographs, how JFK Jr.’s hair was integral to his personality, and what it was like to wear exact recreations of their most iconic outfits.
The couple, dubbed American royalty by the media, made headlines for their passionate romance, which at times steamed into public arguments.
While recreating the couple’s most infamous fight in Central Park, the actors sparked real-world concern, so much so that the pretend outburst was reported as a domestic disturbance on the Citizen app.
“It was interesting to feel how my own sort of nervous system reacted, and recognizing that we were there doing our jobs as actors on a television set, and Carolyn and John were existing just trying to live their lives,” Pidgeon said on the podcast. “It was very different, but knowing that, my body temperature changed when I would realize that there were onlookers or paparazzi.”
Like the show’s subject, Love Story has come under media scrutiny for its sometimes inaccurate portrayal of the famous couple. Jack Schlossberg, the grandson of President Kennedy, called the show “grotesque” for “profiting off” his uncle’s story.
Pidgeon said there was a great deal about Bessette she learned only through acting as her.
“I learned about her sense of humor and wit and just her quickness,” Pidgeon said. “There are so many two-dimensional images of her, and she’s seen as this paragon of beauty and icon of minimalist fashion, but like, she’s so exuberant.”
Kelly added that JFK Jr. was much the same way. He wanted to be “a regular guy,” but “couldn’t.”
“He had this everyman quality to him. He also made everyone feel as if they were the only person in the world,” he continued. “And Carolyn had that as well.”
FX’s Love Story is available to watch on Hulu. New episodes stream every Thursday.
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