Playing a real-life person is never easy. There’s the responsibility of doing justice to the individual, not to mention expectations from a public forever ready to pounce. It’s even harder when the character is a modern-day figure still very much in the collective consciousness and remembered by living loved ones. And if the person was famous but so fiercely private that she never gave a single interview during her brief lifetime? Well, good luck.
Such was the task that Sarah Pidgeon faced when she was cast in the FX limited series “Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette.” In her first on-screen lead role, Pidgeon stars as the enigmatic woman from Connecticut who, in the 1990s, became the girlfriend and then wife of one of the most famous men in the world, John F. Kennedy Jr. (played by newcomer Paul Anthony Kelly). Known for her impeccable style and elegance, Bessette remains a revered symbol of ’90s minimalism. But contemporary media twisted her resistance to celebrity into haughtiness. The paparazzi stalked her and JFK Jr. like rapacious hunters, photographing them around New York City and everywhere else they went until they died in a plane crash in 1999. At the time, Pidgeon was just 3 years old.
“I knew her image and I had a very baseline knowledge of her,” the actress, 30, said during a Zoom call from New York City in July, her naturally dark brown hair still Bessette blond. “There is this shared understanding of her essence. While being an incredibly private person, she had such a presence.
“And through learning about her, I pieced together interviews with people who were close to her. So it was this puzzle of trying to find proof in photos and videos of who she was, how she changes a room when she walks in and how it makes you feel when you see these photos of her that feel so timeless 30 years later. It was an exciting challenge — I’ll say that much.”
Pidgeon’s performance earned her an Emmy nomination, her first, and has placed her in a brighter spotlight than ever before. After premiering in February, “Love Story” became FX’s most-watched limited series of all time, with 65 million hours viewed globally. The latest hit from the Ryan Murphy machine introduced a new generation to the glamorous, tragic couple, sparking a fascination palpable in day-to-day life (Bessette’s signature tortoiseshell headband sold out at the Manhattan-based pharmacy C.O. Bigelow multiple times) and on social media, which was deluged with more than 21 million posts tied to #lovestory. Feeds were flooded with images of the Kennedy pair frozen in time at the dawn of a new millennium, gone before either of them turned 40.
Finding herself at the center of this flurry has been heady for Pidgeon, who, prior to this past past winter, was best known for her Tony-nominated turn in the 2023 Broadway play “Stereophonic” and for the 2020 Prime Video drama series “The Wilds.” While episodes of “Love Story” were still rolling out weekly in the spring, she was in Australia, shooting the feature “Honeymoon With Harry” opposite Jake Gyllenhaal and Kevin Costner, largely isolated from the show’s reverberation in the culture.
“I think I’m still processing,” she said. “I’m just sort of metabolizing what life is and what the show means now. I was away, out of New York, but now I’m in the city, and people are coming up to me and telling me how inspired they were by Carolyn’s story. My experience, really, in the main, was creating the character and being on that set every day, thinking about the scenes we were shooting and what I wanted to do with them. Then it takes on this life of its own. So it’s been really wonderful to feel like what you do has an impact. It can feel so insular and so personal for a really long time.”
There is a certain irony that “Love Story,” which explores a woman’s difficult relationship to fame, has boosted Pidgeon’s profile. “The lack of anonymity is strange, especially living in New York,” she said. “I mean, I’ve, like, cried walking down these streets. I’ve spilled my secrets on a phone call clomping down Fifth Avenue. I’m no longer a face in the crowd. But I want to do things that resonate with people, which I guess comes with a certain amount of recognition. I don’t think that will ever put me in a bad mood for someone to say, ‘I loved watching “Love Story.”’”
Acting has fed Pidgeon’s creative drive since she was a kid growing up outside Detroit, the younger of two daughters born to lawyer parents who encouraged her interest in the arts. She took dance, music and painting classes, acted in local plays and attended a theater-focused summer camp. “As I got into middle school, acting became something that I really had a passion for and I think I started to excel at it,” she said. “It wasn’t just something that I liked to do; there was a promise that I was good at it.”
After high school, Pidgeon enrolled in the Carnegie Mellon School of Drama in Pittsburgh, graduating with a BFA in 2018. Diploma fresh in hand, she was cast in “The Wilds” as one of eight troubled teenage girls stranded on a deserted island who learn they are the subjects of a sadistic sociopsychological study. The show wasn’t a massive hit — and was soon eclipsed by Showtime’s similarly themed “Yellowjackets” — but when it ended after two seasons, Pidgeon emerged as the clear breakout.
“I’m really grateful that I got something out of college so quickly, because it was a really hard year of transition,” she said. “I had a sign from the universe saying, ‘This might work out.’ I remember getting my check for the ‘Wilds’ pilot and I thought, ‘No one has ever been this rich!’”
The exposure led to her role as the younger version of Kathryn Hahn’s character in the Hulu adaptation of Cheryl Strayed’s “Tiny Beautiful Things,” which earned Pidgeon stellar reviews and opened the door to “Stereophonic,” a drama about tensions within a Fleetwood Mac-inspired band set in a recording studio in the 1970s. Critics hailed her performance as the Stevie Nicks-like force of nature Diana (the New York Times singled out her “stunning vulnerability” and “sterling, ethereal vocals”).
“My stress levels were high doing “Stereophonic” because of the singing. Every single day I would wake up and do my vocal exercises,” she said. “It’s so rewarding — just the endurance. I mean, talk about changing your brain. I felt like a different person after I did that show.”
And then came “Love Story.” When news of the project (created by Connor Hines) popped up in her inbox, Pidgeon sent off her audition video. “Even though she had this dark hair, we saw her tape and were really intrigued,” executive producer Brad Simpson said. “Her performance had a Carolyn-type quality where there was something unknowable about her and yet immediately entrancing.”
It helped that Pidgeon, like Bessette, is 5 foot 10 and has blue eyes; her agents also sent over a headshot with her hair photoshopped blond. She then flew to L.A. to read in person. “Frequently a person comes in and they steal the part,” EP Nina Jacobson said. “They’re the bar nobody else can reach, and you just feel total conviction and certainty that you found your person. That was the way it was with Sarah. We felt so confident with her.”
Pidgeon spent the next several months learning as much as she could about Bessette. She read Elizabeth Beller’s 2024 biography “Once Upon a Time: The Captivating Life of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy” (one of the show’s key narrative sources) and pored over hundreds of photos, looking for clues as to who this woman raised by a single mother really was.
She studied the few existing video clips in which Bessette speaks. In some of them, she asks photographers not to stand so close to her as she walks down the street. In another, from 1999, she’s on the red carpet with her husband at a charity event and volleys a witty reply to an “Entertainment Tonight” reporter’s question about all the handsome men in attendance: “I think it’s kind of fabulous. I hope they’re all sitting with me.” Stitched together, the entire vault of known Carolyn Bessette video footage with audio lasts about 70 seconds.
“There were so many times when I wished I had a two-and-a-half-minute interview of her speaking about, I don’t know, where she drops her dry cleaning off. Something just totally banal,” Pidgeon said. “It would have been so helpful to hear her cadence and see how she moved when she wasn’t being stalked by paparazzi. But I didn’t have that. There were a lot of times when I thought, ‘What if I’m completely missing the mark?’”
The person that I understand her to be was fiercely loyal, very strong, had a strong opinion and could make you feel incredibly known, even if you were a stranger.
Sarah Pidgeon on Carolyn Bessette
Gradually, a portrait came into focus: a warm, confident, self-possessed individual who rose from a post-college retail job at a Calvin Klein shop in suburban Boston to the brand’s head of publicity in Manhattan.
“She was not this ice queen. There was this vivaciousness to her,” said Pidgeon, who trained with a movement coach to emulate Bessette’s walk and posture. “The person that I understand her to be was fiercely loyal, very strong, had a strong opinion and could make you feel incredibly known, even if you were a stranger. She was described as gesticulating wildly at times, and she would touch people, she would really connect with people. These characteristics made the photos of her make a lot more sense.”
Working with Constance Zimmer was another key to unlocking the mystery. Zimmer earned a supporting Emmy nomination for her turn as Bessette’s mother, Ann Marie Messina, who raised her three young daughters on her own for several years following her divorce from their father. Zimmer plays her as a protective matriarch unintimidated by Kennedy power — which Pidgeon said helped her understand how her own character grew up to be so self-assured.
“I love that Sarah said that, because I do think a lot of people go, ‘Where did she come up with that strength of character?’” Zimmer said. “It’s like, well, because she was raised by a single mom. I was raised by a single mom, essentially. And it definitely informs who you are as a woman.
“It’s been really exciting to watch Sarah get all the accolades, because she cared so much about the character. When you are playing real people, that’s a tall order. And Sarah did it. The strength within who Sarah Pidgeon is, and the lighthearted love that she has about life and people, that was all wrapped up in there. She figured out a way to let all of those things show.”
A carefree buoyancy does course through the first half of “Love Story,” when we watch Bessette stride around a pre-9/11, smartphone-free New York City, on the rise professionally and falling in love with “America’s Son.” But as the timeline clicks closer to July 1999, when the couple and Bessette’s sister Lauren (Sydney Lemmon) boarded JFK Jr.’s Piper Saratoga bound for the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port, Mass., it’s hard to shake a foreboding feeling that everything is about to come to a devastating end. (It is believed that roughly an hour into the flight, JFK Jr. experienced spatial disorientation and crashed the plane off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard, killing all three passengers on impact.)
Shooting the scene on the tarmac before takeoff, which opens the show before it cuts back to the early ’90s, was tough. “I did find myself thinking a lot, of course, about what would have happened had they not gone that day, or if the weather were a little different. I mean, you can’t help but think that,” Pidgeon said. “It was quite solemn some days, even without having anything to do with the plane, just being in New York and shooting outside of North Moore Street [where they lived]. Like, this is where they would walk together. They were here.”
In an uncanny bit of life-imitating-art-imitating-life, paparazzi showed up on set, snapping early photos of Pidgeon in a blond wig and a fast-fashion wardrobe. The internet tore both of the styling choices to shreds for being entirely uncharacteristic of Bessette. (The production soon remedied the problems.) Later, one of the Kennedys weighed in: Jack Schlossberg, the son of JFK Jr.’s sister Caroline, called the show “a grotesque display.”
Pidgeon understands the sensitivity. “I was aware even when I got the audition that Carolyn and John are modern figures in history. A lot of people knew them and loved them,” she said. “So I was not caught off guard that people would comment on it. It just reinvigorated my commitment to trying to understand her as best I could and making sure that I approached this characterization with empathy, tenderness, respect. I didn’t know that this many people would watch the show, but the people who did, I wanted them to have an understanding of the person I came to know, who’s more than just a publicist and someone’s wife.”
Now that the initial fervor around “Love Story” has quieted, Pidgeon has time to reflect on life after being Bessette. “I found myself surprised by how much I want to possess the qualities that I believed Carolyn to have,” she said. “Playing her, she rubbed off on me in the way that she pushed for what she thought was right or true. That was a great surprise and a gift.”
She hasn’t decided on her next project, though she has noticed an uptick in her options. “I still am working for jobs, but because I have more choice, I have more agency over my career,” she said. “And that’s a big adjustment because it’s scary to have more choice. I’m having to ask myself more and more: What type of actor do I want to be? What type of career do I want to have? Who do I want to work with? There have been times when I’ve just been so down in the dumps [between jobs]. I feel more like myself when I’m acting — I feel the fullest versions of [my emotions]. When there have been long stretches of not having that, I mean, it’s just awful.”
So she’s been turning to other creative outlets: music, drawing, reading. And she’s been settling back into her home base in New York City after such a busy first half of the year. “I want to start a poker club — but I need to learn how to play poker first,” she said, laughing. “I am just really trying to be rooted here, having rituals that aren’t necessarily exciting — knowing where I get my coffee, what cheese I like at the market. Because my life is itinerant, I miss small things.”
Down the line, she’d happily return to Broadway. She hopes to start producing TV and film projects of her own. But all that can wait. “I’m still searching how to feel like a full person when I’m not working,” she said, “because I know if I find that, then my work will be better.”
This story first ran in the Down to the Wire Drama issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.
