“Love Story” is far from the first time executive producers Nina Jacobson and Brad Simpson have worked on a show that dramatizes real people. The duo previously collaborated on all three seasons of “American Crime Story,” another series in Ryan Murphy’s extended FX universe, but neither Jacobson nor Simpson were expecting the intense scrutiny around their saga about John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette Kennedy.
“It certainly was like nothing I’ve ever experienced before,” Simpson told TheWrap ahead of the series premiere.
Early in production, test photos of Paul Kelly as JFK Jr. and Sarah Pidgeon as Bessette Kennedy were released — something that also happened during the O.J. Simpson and Versace seasons of “ACS.” But instead of merely generating a couple of headlines, the images caused a huge reaction online.
“There was a point where we were in New York City and 17 paparazzi were following us everywhere. Sarah was being hunted,” Simpson said. “It really was a meta experience because it was similar to what Carolyn Bessette herself went through.”
Ultimately, the EPs did take the online criticism into account and made adjustments to the fashion of the show. However, the intense scrutiny also proved to Simpson, Jacobson and series creator Connor Hines how beloved these two people still are to the American public.
“In some ways, part of what makes this story feel so contemporary is that it is an early version of these parasocial relationships that now are ubiquitous — the way that people feel Taylor Swift belongs to them and Travis Kelce belongs to them,” Jacobson said. “Yet those folks have a lot more control over their image and representation of themselves than certainly [Bessette Kennedy] did, especially as a proper civilian.”
JFK Jr. and Bessette Kennedy’s romance was about as close to an American fairy tale as you can get. When the two met, Bessette Kennedy was a fashion publicist for Calvin Klein. By all accounts, the couple seemed to truly love each other and quickly started to build a life together. But Bessette Kennedy had no interest in the cameras and press that followed her and her husband around constantly. Their lives were cut tragically short in 1999 when they died in a plane crash alongside Bessette Kennedy’s sister, Lauren.
“Love Story” stands as a sincere ode to this couple’s romance. Rather than portraying either part as a villain, it’s America’s obsession with the Kennedy family that is put on trial.
“The degree of possessiveness people felt towards them and how intensely they felt it, we were struck by the fact that hasn’t gone away. It’s actually only compounded,” Jacobson said. “Carolyn has become kind of a posthumous influencer who’s incredibly well known to a generation of people who weren’t even alive when she was in her most photographed phase.”
“[‘Love Story’] was certainly an opportunity to have a meditation on our relationship with fame, especially in today’s age where attention and views are the cultural currency,” Hines pointed out.
The series’ creator noted it was important to show exactly what it means to lose both your privacy and control over your own narrative. “Carolyn particularly — unlike a lot of people today — was not somebody that coveted attention or the spotlight. We really see the toll that attention and scrutiny can take on somebody,” he added.
It’s a lofty vision and one that could only be accomplished with perfect casting. If audiences didn’t believe that Kelly and Pidgeon could be their historical counterparts — or worse, if they lacked JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette Kennedy’s electric chemistry — the whole series would have flopped. Heading into casting, the team was confident they could find their JFK Jr. quickly and that finding Bessette Kennedy would prove to be the bigger challenge. The opposite proved to be true.
“During our first day of live auditions, Sarah Pidgeon walked in. We’d all seen her in ‘Stereophonic’ and we knew her as a brunette. But she walked in, and she took that role,” Simpson shared. “She just had the charisma, the warmth, but also the distance and aloofness that make a stew of what we knew about Carolyn.”
As for JFK Jr., the team looked at thousands of actors and still came up short. At one point, Hines started cold calling models he saw on Instagram — respectfully, of course.
“We were trying to find something that doesn’t really exist anymore. It was a sort of 1970s, 1980s masculinity, a hairy-chested — good luck finding hairy chests on actors nowadays — a hairy-chested masculinity, a Richard Gere, a George Clooney. He had to look not just like that, but like John. We got really down to the wire,” Simpson said.
For a while, the team feared they would have to push back production. But after going back to the slush pile, the team found Kelly. His look brought him back in for the role, but it was his screen test with Pidgeon that sealed his casting.
“We just watched the chemistry between them. The hair person came by me and said, ‘You’ve got to cast him. You’re insane if you don’t cast him,’” Simpson recalled. In the end, Pidgeon was the one who told Kelly he landed the role.
“It was clear that Sarah felt it too,” Hines said. “She had been doing so many chemistry reads, and when she felt the conviction that this is supposed to be JFK Jr., it only solidified our decision.”
The first three episodes of “Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette” premiere on FX and Hulu Thursday at 9 p.m. ET / 6 p.m. PT. New episodes premiere on Thursdays.
