What happens when the person you’ve fallen in love with is also someone the entire world believes it owns? In Ryan Murphy’s Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette, the intoxicating romance between America’s closest equivalent to royalty and the fiercely independent woman who captured his heart becomes an increasingly heartbreaking examination of fame, identity and the devastating cost of living a private life in the public eye. Inspired by Elizabeth Beller’s “Once Upon a Time: The Captivating Life of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy”, the nine-episode limited series stars Paul Anthony Kelly as John F. Kennedy Jr. and Sarah Pidgeon as Carolyn Bessette, tracing their whirlwind courtship and marriage as the relentless scrutiny surrounding them threatens to overwhelm the very relationship that brought them together.
For Paul Anthony Kelly, stepping into the shoes of one of the twentieth century’s most recognisable figures meant looking beyond the familiar photographs, headlines and carefully constructed public image to uncover a man struggling to reconcile who he was expected to be with who he desperately wanted to become. Speaking with our Peter Gray in a one-on-one conversation, the actor reflected on John’s inability to fully comprehend what loving him was costing Carolyn, the rebellious artistic ambitions that revealed a different side of the Kennedy heir, and the unexpected parallels between John’s struggle for independence and his own journey towards establishing himself as an actor.
What I found really striking about the private interior you found with John is how radically different his baseline was from Carolyn’s. He was born into a world where being watched was simply part of being alive, whereas she had to learn how to survive that attention. Did you feel his greatest blind spot in their relationship was that he couldn’t fully grasp what loving him was costing her?
Absolutely. I think you hit the nail right on the head. That’s probably the biggest blind spot of their relationship. Certainly his, because he never had known anything other than being on a pedestal in the spotlight. No matter what he did, it was documented. I think that anonymity was something he wasn’t aware of just how much it really cost Carolyn.
I feel like that tension highlights how much of John’s reality was hidden from the camera as well. We have decades of headlines and photographs of him, but as an actor, your job is to inhabit the moments no one photographed. Was there something you found in those unobserved spaces that unlocked him for you as a performer?
Yeah, definitely. In my research of him, I found that he really wanted to be an actor, and in that there’s a rebelliousness. It’s so far from the Kennedy ethos. He was really into music. He was into the arts. But he really just wanted to do his own thing, be his own man. In that, you have this kind of double life where you’re living up to expectations that are inescapable. It’s that conflict of who (he) could have been as opposed to he was supposed to be.
It’s almost like John finding his own voice, and then Paul finding his own voice, because you’ve spent so many years working towards an acting opportunity, and your first role is this image and identity that’s been so firmly established in a public consciousness. Did you ever find this sort of unexpected connection between your own journey of establishing yourself as an actor and then John’s struggle to be recognised for something beyond who he was?
Yeah, absolutely. I think the parallels are very clear. It was easy to draw my lived experience thus far, and find how it relates to what he went through. Obviously, they’re two different things, but the core emotions and base of it are really the same. It’s striving for something you want when you’re categorized as something else.
And just before letting you go, because John spent so much of his life surrounded by people who wanted to protect him, yet when he fell in love with Carolyn, he couldn’t necessarily protect her from the world he inhabited. Did you see that inability to protect her as something that gradually changed the way he saw himself?
I think so. Yeah. It would definitely be a rude awakening, for sure. As someone who’s been sheltered within the public eye, but then very sheltered to not being able to take care of her the way that she needed, or help her deal with something he’s always just been a product of….it was definitely a downfall.
Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette is now streaming on FX and FX on Hulu in the United States and Hulu on Disney+ in Australia.
