In FX’s Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette, a whirlwind romance begins between one of the most famous men in the world, John F. Kennedy Jr. (Paul Anthony Kelly), and Carolyn Bessette (Sarah Pidgeon), a doomed union that provokes less-than-positive reactions from Carolyn’s mother Ann Marie Messina (Constance Zimmer).
Awards Buzz spoke with Zimmer about how much attention she remembers paying to this phenomenon when the couple got together:
“I was probably just like everybody else, I mean completely obsessed with them. Wanting to open up every magazine and every newspaper and find out more about them because it just felt like, oh my God, if it happened to her, it can happen to me. It was very much that love story that is normally only in fairy tales, right? I’ll be honest, I think even like from the young age I was at, I really was so enamored by how you didn’t know that much about her. You just got to see her all the time and you got to just think about or imagine what her life was like, what their life was like. In reading the book and doing the show, the realization that, again, it’s that reality versus what everybody thinks is a picture-perfect life is not. Everybody has their struggles and their hardships. It was just as interesting for me to read the book and then think, oh my God, I didn’t know any of this. Of course we didn’t. How could we?”
She shared how it felt to be playing the least famous person in this story:
“I think it gave me a little bit more freedom than most had because there was really the most with her was photos. There wasn’t a lot of her talking or speaking. She didn’t want to be in the public eye and there was no reason for her to be in it. Being an elementary school teacher, that is a life that is somebody who just wants to give to others and teach and doesn’t want people to think that she needs anything from them. I loved her honesty and her unfiltered way that she spoke to her daughters and really to anyone, to be quite honest. That was something I read about her in the book and ad any research I did It was mostly about her personality and who she was. That to me felt like, oh, she was a badass. And we just caught her at a time that was challenging.”
Watch the video above to hear her rave about being part of a Ryan Murphy project that’s nearly as popular as this couple’s real-life romance and her reflections on what UnREAL and Entourage would be like if they were made today.
Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette is streaming on Hulu.
