JFK Jr and Carolyn Bessette’s Sex, Lies and Politics

But then, Kelly started out by observing Kennedy from a remove. The actor grew up in a small town in Ontario, which cut both ways as he prepared to play a defining icon of late-20th-century Americana. “It lent to my nervousness and intimidation, playing royalty,” he says. The family hadn’t meant much to him before he got the part: “It’s not in my life — it is now, but it wasn’t growing up. It wasn’t so close to my heart.”

Much of the audience simply cannot relate: With its rich, familiar subject matter, “Love Story,” premiering on Feb. 12, is poised to become one of the most-discussed shows of the year. The telling of this legendary couple’s story is a Calvin Klein Obsession-scented love letter to the moment they lived through, and to the potential that was lost when their plane went down on July 16, 1999. It’s the latest iteration of Ryan Murphy’s project of excavating recent history to examine our relationship with celebrities, but unlike the offerings in the “American Crime Story,” “Feud” or “Monster” franchises, “Love Story” holds at its center no small amount of heart (and lust), with an acting duet that introduces Kelly and Pidgeon to the world. Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie of “Heated Rivalry” got the month of January to themselves as newly minted TV stars. But Kelly and Pidgeon will take Valentine’s Day.

Richie Shazam for Variety

This show shouldn’t have worked. (And it very nearly didn’t.) Since becoming a global celebrity in the mid-’90s, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy has become venerated for her restrained, aloof glamour. Any result short of nailing it will result in derision, as the production learned when images from the set were roundly mocked online.

But instead, “Love Story” is captivating: The music, style and culture of the era, from Carolyn’s workspace at the Calvin Klein offices to the glass-bricked loft where the couple live, burst into life on-screen. Amid the turbulence of John and Carolyn finding each other and then their marriage falling apart lie little bits of lovingly constructed detail, like Alessandro Nivola’s louche performance as Klein or the conjuring of New York club culture — back when people still smoked indoors.

Beyond the specifics, though, the story has an elemental pull. Carolyn Bessette was an unexpected match for the nation’s most eligible bachelor; she had grown up middle-class, and worked her way up within the fashion industry. (That she was not a fit with the Kennedy family — including John’s high-achieving sister, Caroline, played by Grace Gummer — is crucial to her appeal. And it’s part of what draws the rebellious John-John to her.) “The way into the story was not through John’s perspective,” says Simpson, “but through a commoner entering the palace. That’s a classic story.”

For Pidgeon, the ups and downs of the pairing made for a full-course meal. “There was a serious love there,” she says. “That was always what we were searching for.”

Murphy had told Simpson and Jacobson — their company Color Force has worked with him since “The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story” — that he wanted to pursue a limited series about Kennedy and Bessette.

But that was the barest of ideas; they needed a writer. Enter Connor Hines, an actor who’d appeared on Hulu’s “Dollface,” among other series. Hines, who hoped to start a second career as a writer, had been watching “The Crown” when it struck him that the Kennedy family’s story would make for a great TV series. (It was such a good idea, in fact, that it wasn’t unique to Hines: Netflix has announced its own take, in which Michael Fassbender will play patriarch Joseph P. Kennedy.) Hines, all of 11 years old when Kennedy’s plane crashed, was deep into researching the clan when he read that Murphy was developing a series about Kennedy and his bride, and he felt a sense of destiny. “On no other subject would I be a value-add to Ryan Murphy,” Hines says, “but on that particular subject, I can add something.”

When I visit the Tribeca set in October 2025, Hines is in constant motion, wearing a preppy cream cable-knit as he oversees the taping of the finale. “It’s jubilant enough?” Pidgeon asks him after multiple takes of a scene in a bar in which Carolyn and John, at the end of their rope, ruefully debrief after marriage counseling. It’s surprising that jubilation is what she’s going for.

The performance in full, though, makes Pidgeon’s desire make sense. The joy behind Carolyn’s seeming hauteur had been a focus in Hines’ pitch to Murphy. “So much of what I read about her was that, when she singled in on you, she could make you feel like the only person in the room with her,” he says. “A wicked sense of humor, swore like a sailor, incredibly emotionally intelligent, a firecracker. After a while, I was like, Oh, I think I have the skeleton of this.”

Richie Shazam for Variety

Those qualities aren’t the ones commonly associated with Bessette Kennedy, who has long presented a conundrum for journalists. Little has been published about her outside the phenomenon of her husband’s fame. Though “Love Story” was announced in 2021, FX Entertainment president Gina Balian says the network waited for the 2024 book “Once Upon a Time: The Captivating Life of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy,” the credited inspiration for the series, to be completed before moving forward with production. “So many people have written about the Kennedys,” Balian says, “but this was really a book about Carolyn and trying to understand her better. All we knew her from was the downcast eyes.”

That shy mien was no joke: Fiercely private, she was, in life, mostly known for being stalked by paparazzi as doggedly as Princess Diana was. (Carolyn, on the series, watches coverage of Diana’s death with horror and fear.) Little wonder that she could appear stricken, and refused to speak publicly. Into this vacuum, a misogynistic sense of her as a harridan or a drug-using flake emerged.

As Hines puts it: “This is a woman that was rendered by a lot of these narratives in a way that felt really unfair and devoid of context, devoid of empathy.”

Pidgeon saw a positive spin on the public’s imagined version of Bessette Kennedy: What is written up in the tabloids as a mess might look, when written and played empathetically, like the life of the party. Pidgeon recalls. “Someone that I spoke to said that you’d all be out at the Odeon or in the East Village, with everybody out smoking and drinking, and someone would call Carolyn — and that’s when the party would start.” Pidgeon, whom I’d last seen on set, a couple months prior, trying to find the jubilation in a conversation about the end of a marriage, seems to come alive herself sharing this recollection. “She laughed,” she says. “She’s funny!”

This understanding of Bessette Kennedy as a person with humor and charm — a depth beyond her wardrobe, reputation and married name — yields a delicate, enigmatic performance. We first meet Carolyn on the last day of her life, rushing to the airport to head to a Kennedy family wedding with her estranged husband and her sister (Sydney Lemmon). She seems impossibly fragile — not in the wounded-glamour sense evoked by photos of her, but on edge, brittle, pained even by the smallest decisions. (Mid-manicure, as she prepares for the wedding, this woman with such a strong sense of personal style changes her mind, declaring that a red nail simply won’t work for the Kennedys.) Then we rewind to who she was before she met John: more self-actualized than the lost soul averting her gaze from the camera lenses.

John, by contrast, was to the manner born, and Kelly plays him as a charmer and a dilletante. (Kelly studied a Kennedy-narrated audiobook of his father’s “Profiles in Courage” to pick up what he calls his “lackadaisical” cadence.) Like many people who have easy relationships with their challenging families, John simply cannot see why his wife would have reason to struggle with her in-laws. But while Carolyn is an unlikely Kennedy-by-marriage, she’s a lot likelier to have passed muster with the late Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis than, say, on-again, off-again Kennedy girlfriend Daryl Hannah would have. (The former first lady is played with stately reserve by Naomi Watts; Dree Hemingway appears as the fiery Daryl.)

Because Onassis died in 1994 without ever meeting her eventual daughter-in-law, Watts played her scenes opposite Kelly. “Even though he’s relatively new as an actor, I could sense immediately on set how accessible he is,” she writes via email. “He’s very much in his body — physically present, emotionally open — with so much going on behind his eyes. For me, the most important thing in a scene partner is emotional availability, and Paul has that in spades.”

Richie Shazam for Variety

It was something like kismet that Kelly landed the role when he did. “He had just moved to Portland thinking maybe acting wasn’t going to happen for him,” Simpson says. Kelly was living in Altadena during the Eaton fire; he relocated to Oregon with the intent of starting a family in an environment not touched by disaster. Visiting Portland before moving, “our cortisol levels just dropped,” Kelly says. “I love to be outdoors, walk and nap and ski and snowboard.” (Poor John had to resort to Central Park for a taste of nature; the actor playing him is surrounded by it.) And when we speak in December, Kelly is expecting his first child. “It’s a lot of change,” he says. “2026 …”

“Big year!” Pidgeon says, grinning.

“2025 was the buildup to all of it, doing the work,” he says. “2026 is where I get to reap the benefits.” He pauses, considering how much of himself to give to a journalist for what will be yet another signpost in the momentous year of 2026: his first magazine cover. “Um … you know,” he says, then decides where to leave the topic. “We’re very, very lucky.”

Kelly’s idyll in Portland was short: He booked “Love Story” three months after his move, then decamped to New York for six months. For him, and for Pidgeon, the noise around the show soon threatened to become overwhelming.

The production was playing out on the streets of New York, and photographers captured it all — just like the paparazzi who trailed the show’s real-life subjects. Early looks at the costuming, including test images the show made public, came in for aggressive criticism — an indication both that the real couple was so dearly loved, and that the production wasn’t quite nailing it. Bessette Kennedy used her wardrobe to “tell you who she was,” concluded fashion writer Danya Issawi in an opinion piece in New York magazine’s The Cut. “I can’t say the same for Murphy’s vision.”

“We had a bump in the summer,” Simpson says. “I actually think it’s good that they got out there, because we listened to a lot of feedback. When you’re making something over seven months, you’re figuring it out.” Rudy Mance, a costumer who’d worked in the fashion department at Condé Nast (and had collaborated with Murphy on “Monster” and “American Horror Story”), was brought in.

“Loving them for so many years — it was a lot of pressure,” Mance says. “I get it. I’m protective of them as well. We all just wanted to be as precise and accurate as possible.” Mance cross-referenced each new look (some 12 to 15 costume changes per episode for Pidgeon) against the body of photographs available. “We studied for months throughout filming,” he says. “A lot of these online people might not have even been alive when she was.”

For Pidgeon especially, the stakes felt personal — and fueled her performance. Bessette Kennedy became, throughout her marriage, a woman trapped by a public image that distorted who she really was; obsessively observed, but unable to share the substance of her performance, Pidgeon was in a similar boat. “Sarah’s nervous system was a pinch of what Carolyn was experiencing,” Pidgeon says, “in the sense that people are having conversations about what you are trying to do.”

And she’s careful to emphasize that it’s just a pinch — her experience was a fraction of Bessette Kennedy’s, and she’s plainly self-conscious about the comparison. “She was trying to live her life and was being hunted by these paparazzos. She was existing. I am aware that I’m an actor trying to do my job on the streets of Tribeca.”

Doing one’s job under such scrutiny is a challenging thing; after all, Bessette Kennedy quit Calvin Klein as the hubbub around her grew to distracting levels. Pidgeon continues: “I was in a play, and the reviews come out, and then you still have months left to do.” A difference, perhaps, is that “Stereophonic” received raves. The “Love Story” set photos did not. “It’s odd to have an awareness of people’s immediate interest.”

Richie Shazam for Variety

The attention was discomfiting, but also reminded Pidgeon of why she wanted the part in the first place: “At a certain point you can’t read what’s online. But at times, it gave me this fuel to be hyperaware and incredibly conscious. At that point, I understood how important these people and their stories were to me.”

And her nervous-system distress went into the performance. “It was Sarah hanging out in between takes, talking to my friends on set, talking to Paul — then being aware that there’s paparazzi there,” Pidgeon says. “Understanding what that did to my heart, my head — I would flush. It woke up a sense memory that I didn’t have before.”

Both actors had worked on their characters’ physical bearing. For Kelly, it meant hitting the gym at 4:30 a.m., before call time, to match John’s look and his relentless, thrumming activity: “He was always on the go, and his processing plant was moving his body — that’s how he processed a situation. If there’s a fight, go for a run afterwards.” And for Pidgeon, the physicality lay, in part, in the wardrobe. As Carolyn moves through marriage, the trench coats Mance provided grew more oversize to emphasize that she is diminishing.

Yohji Yamamoto, a favorite designer of Bessette Kennedy’s, is said to view women’s clothing as a kind of armor. Pidgeon, after learning this, intuitively understood. “That made so much sense — this feeling that you have to put on armor to go out into this world that’s focused so intensely on her. I was so eager to see this woman go from a young woman pounding the pavement in New York — how does that big body that can take up space change and get smaller?”

This time, the wardrobe — picked apart relentlessly online — helped.

By the time Mance fine-tuned the costumes, a certain guiding vision for the look of the series had taken over: accuracy above all. The stakes were high: Bessette Kennedy is the standard-bearer for minimalist chic, and her street style remains the exemplar for a generation of young women raised on fashion-inspo Tumblr. Mance distressed a Birkin bag to mirror the casual way Bessette Kennedy treated her finery — “We beat the hell out of it,” he says — and sourced a specific Prada bag from an Etsy user in Ukraine to match her paparazzi-captured look on her return from her honeymoon.

“Prada, that season, did two different versions of the bag,” Mance says, “and the top stitching was different. We did one take with the wrong bag.” The costumer was upset that even a stitch might not have the authentic Bessette Kennedy look, until he was informed that the proper purse had arrived just in time. “Thank God,” he says. “The next shot was an up-close, tight shot of the bag.” Given how carefully everything about Carolyn is studied, he’s right: Someone would have noticed.

Other kinds of scrutiny on “Love Story” have been less forgiving. Jack Schlossberg, the nephew of Kennedy and a candidate for Congress, has been involved in an extensive and mutually harsh war of words with Murphy over the existence of a series made without the permission or input of the Kennedy family. On social media, Schlossberg has taken a disproportionate and rageful approach, saying that Murphy “looks like a thumb” and calling the producer a “pervert.” In an interview with The New York Times, Schlossberg elaborated: “In my mind, that’s a form of perversion, to be so obsessed with somebody’s sexuality and their love life, to produce a multimillion-dollar series about them.”

The Schlossberg campaign did not respond to a request for comment; Murphy declined to be interviewed for this story. For his part, Kelly (whom Schlossberg called “bloated” in a different Instagram rant), demurs when asked about the back-and-forth. “First of all, this is a love story,” he says. “That’s something that everyone can relate to. They were such public figures that there was no escaping that, but they went through what everyone dreams of — falling in love. But everyone’s entitled to their opinion.”

“It is not a gotcha version of the story or scandalous,” says Jacobson, one of the show’s executive producers. “It is quite earnest in the romance and in our approach to them as people.”

Richie Shazam for Variety

The series, though, also arrives at a moment when Camelot — the nickname given to the Kennedy dynasty, back when it dominated American life — is enduring both tragedy and embarrassment. Schlossberg’s sister Tatiana Schlossberg died at 35 last December, shortly after the publication of a devastating New Yorker essay about her experience with acute myeloid leukemia. In that piece, she joined other members of her family, a perceived bastion of American liberalism, in decrying how her relative, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is working to undermine the American health care system. Sight unseen, it might be reasonable for a Kennedy to wonder just what else this show will force the family to endure.

“I hail from two very large Irish Catholic families on either side,” Hines says. “My grandparents had shrines to the president and Jackie. I have such tremendous respect for the family and what they’ve been through. And because I know that our writers always led with sensitivity and compassion in every part of the storytelling process — yes, I knew there might be backlash, but once people see it, they will feel a different type of way.”

Still, there’s the fact of the tragedy surrounding Kennedy and Bessette Kennedy; what might have been, had they lived? “Love Story” presents a vision that’s not without hope — though their marriage is foundering at the moment of their deaths, they’re trying to find a way it can work. Later episodes in the season, says FX chairman John Landgraf, “get into these two people trying to drill down to the core of why they love each other. They’re having trouble supporting each other, when that’s really genuinely what they want to do.”

The eighth and penultimate episode especially stands out in Pidgeon’s memory. It takes place entirely within the loft where Carolyn, hounded by photographers, has holed up as a sort of prisoner. The onetime life of the party has gone dark, and her husband cannot cope with her isolation and anger. At one point he leaves her to go for a run. This installment, in which both partners find just the right way to hurt one another, came late in the production. Pidgeon and Kelly had already lived through being told, incessantly, that they didn’t look right for their parts; they’d been through other dramas, too, like an outdoor fight scene being reported as a real domestic disturbance on the Citizen app. They formed something of a bond.

“It was so incredible to be in that space and have that communion between each other, having so much to draw on. The intention was for it to feel like a three-act play,” says Pidgeon, who knows a little something about theater acting. “I love that feeling in performance when you’re trying to keep this ball in the air.” The scenes have the spontaneity of a fight between longtime partners, in which the perfect idea for how to cut deep arrives suddenly; perhaps Kelly and Pidgeon could have gotten there only at the end of the shoot. “There was a 17-page scene at one point,” she goes on. “I love the pressure. And it was incredible it happened at that moment in our process.”

If the show has done its job, by Episode 8, viewers will be on board with this vision of Carolyn. “I think in understanding, just by being a serious people-pleaser, that I won’t be able to please everyone, the goal really solidified for me,” Pidgeon says. “If I could wake up that familiarity of essence in some way, then that would be some sort of success.”

“Love Story” is so named — which is to say, it’s not “American Love Story” — so that it may travel. “FX is not merely a U.S. domestic basic-cable network anymore,” Landgraf says. “It’s now a streaming brand on a global platform.” That evolution has come with some complications, as evidenced by the fact that the show’s key art advises viewers to seek it out on “FX/Hulu on Disney+.” “I would be lying if I didn’t admit that I sometimes miss the days when we were a channel that was in 100 million homes and had a direct, branded pipeline into people’s living rooms,” Landgraf adds, but FX becoming part of Disney after the 2019 20th Century Fox merger has enabled the network to take grander swings. “Love Story,” with its global ambition, is a component of that.

It’s a part, too, of what may keep FX from becoming just another tile on an endless interface. Murphy, despite his five-year sojourn at Netflix, is elemental to the FX brand. With his horror drama “The Beauty,” he’ll have two shows airing there simultaneously (not to mention his recent legal soap “All’s Fair” for sister platform Hulu), and Landgraf credits his medical soap “Nip/Tuck” in part for inspiring him to join the network. Murphy as idea-generation machine is integral to a brand that needs both volume and thoughtfully made work to continue to keep up. “A lot of brands we used to compete with are going away,” Landgraf says, “and the sense that there are a million different streaming platforms is starting to winnow down to a limited number that have real scale and relevance.”

And who, perhaps, is more relevant than perennial inspiration Carolyn Bessette Kennedy? That’s how it feels watching Pidgeon in action on the set in October. With cigarette in hand, she uses the smoke to punctuate the points she’s making in conversation with her estranged husband; all the fight’s left her, and she’s more tired and sad than angry.

“Our marriage counselor hates us,” Carolyn declares. She exhales showily, filling the air with haze and with an outsize contempt for herself and for her spouse. She goes on to share some memories of time they’d spent together. “If only we knew then,” she intones.

“What?” John asks her.

“How good we had it,” Carolyn says with a gravelly flatness. Then Pidgeon seamlessly tries the line again, imbuing it with a lusty sense of drama, a recognition that even at the worst moment of her life, no one can take away the charisma that trails ­her like smoke. This Carolyn, despite all that she’s suffered in the public eye, remains aware of the aura that surrounds her. She is, for a moment, remembering a private Camelot — one that’s already vanished.

Location: The Standard, High Line; Styling (Pidgeon): Emma Jade Morrison/The Wall Group; Styling (Kelly): Warren Alfie Baker/The Wall Group; Makeup (Pidgeon): Shayna Goldberg/The Wall Group; Grooming (Kelly): Jessica Ortiz/Kalpana; Hair (Pidgeon): David Von Cannon/A-Frame Agency; Look 1 (cover): On Pidgeon: Dress: Valentino; On Kelly: Full look: Tom Ford; Look 2 (Blue Dress and Brown suit): On Pidgeon: Dress and Shoes; Saint Laurent; On Kelly: Shirt and Suit Jacket: Amiri; Pants: Brioni; Boots: Christian Louboutin; Look 3 (Black jacket and turquoise shirt): On Pidgeon: Suit: Tom Ford; On Kelly: Shirt: Brioni; Leather pants: Amiri; Look 4 (Disco Ball): On Pidgeon: Full look: Chanel; On Kelly: Suit: Paul Smith; Shirt: Brioni; Boots: Christian Louboutin; Look 5 (Kelly Solo): Full look: John Varvatos