Farewell to JFK Jr. and Carolyn: The 'Love Story' Tribute | Vanity Fair

To executive producers Brad Simpson and Nina Jacobson, it seems like just yesterday that Love Story was on the brink of disaster. “A year ago we were still desperately looking for our JFK [Jr.] We were still writing episodes,” Simpson says. Four months later, “we were being declared DOA based on the on-set photos”—early test shots that were torn apart for supposedly not capturing Carolyn Bessette’s iconic look. “People on the internet were saying that Sarah [Pidgeon] was a bad choice for the role.”

Looks like Love Story got the last laugh. Before the series finale aired on Thursday, March 26, the show about John F. Kennedy Jr. and Bessette’s doomed romance had already smashed records for FX, becoming the network’s most watched limited series ever on Disney+ and Hulu—logging more than 25 million hours viewed and counting. “When people start dressing their dogs like your characters, you feel like you really hit the jackpot,” Jacobson says.

In an exclusive interview with Vanity Fair, Simpson and Jacobson—longtime colleagues on Ryan Murphy’s American Story franchise—unpack Love Story’s heart-wrenching finale, “Search and Recovery,” which chronicles the tragic end of JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy. “We never wanted it to feel prurient, indulgent, exploitative, horrific,” Jacobson says. “We knew what our guardrails were, how we wanted it to feel—and how we definitely wanted it not to feel. ”

Vanity Fair: The series begins with scenes leading up to JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette’s plane crash, and the finale revisits that tragedy. Did you always know you were going to structure the series that way?

Brad Simpson: We always knew. The last episode’s always a challenge, because you’re telling what is usually the most known part of the story. In [The People v. O.J. Simpson], O.J.’s acquitted. In [The Assassination of Gianni Versace], after the assassination, Andrew Cunanan kills himself on a houseboat. [In Impeachment], Bill Clinton is impeached. These episodes are the ones the audience usually knows the most about.

We knew the episodes that came before this were going to be really intense, and they were going to be about the marriage fracturing. We really wanted to remind people what was great about them and provide some hope. It wasn’t until last summer, late in the summer, that we decided with [Love Story creator] Connor [Hines] and Ryan [Murphy] to split the episode exactly almost down the middle, with the plane crash happening right at the midpoint, and to spend a good chunk of time with the characters that we love so much living in the aftermath.

Nina Jacobson: We knew that we wanted it to be very restrained in terms of the accident itself. We knew what we didn’t want it to be from the beginning. We love these characters too much.

The episode begins with John and Carolyn in a couples therapy session. We watch them fall in love with each other again—they even return to Panna II, the restaurant where they had their first date. Can you talk about that decision, showing them mending their relationship?

Simpson: Everyone knew that he’d moved out. We knew that it was rocky, and they were having good times and bad times. We knew that she had committed to going to this wedding, and they were in couples counseling. In terms of the unknowable question of “what would happen if they hadn’t gone down on the plane,” I think our tendency was to lean toward hope and toward positivity.

We wanted to go back to that Indian restaurant. We wanted to go back, after two really intense episodes, to the romance between the two of them. Lean in to the idea that the show’s about how relationships are tough. You have a great romance that has to live in the reality of a marriage. What we wanted to lean toward was a hopeful ending amidst all the tragedy.

How did it feel shooting the finale?

Simpson: It was very emotional for the actors. We had this really intimate experience between Paul [Anthony Kelly] and Sarah [Pidgeon]. Then we landed on bringing all our cast back together again. We mostly shot in chronological order, and we were saying goodbye to people as we went along. This cast had really gotten close, especially around the wedding, when they were spending a ton of time together.

The Indian restaurant, that was actually one of our toughest days. I think that both Paul and Sarah were having a lot of trouble saying goodbye to the characters. And it was hot outside, even on a day when it was usually cold in New York. There was a lot of stumbling with the lines. They were trying to figure out how to say goodbye to these characters they’d lived with for a long time.

The second half of the finale is focused on the family’s reaction to John and Carolyn’s deaths, specifically that of Caroline Kennedy (Grace Gummer) and Ann Marie Messina (Constance Zimmer). What was it like turning the story to those characters?

Jacobson: As you make a show, what you learn along the way is how great those performances were from our supporting cast. [We wanted to] give them some closure as avatars for the audience—giving the audience some time to process the loss as well, through actors who could just really devastate you without it ever feeling maudlin.

Simpson: One of the most emotional days was the moment when Caroline breaks down in the kitchen. Grace had given us this restrained performance. She’s playing a woman who doesn’t show a lot of emotions, who doesn’t wear a heart on her sleeve, who’s much more restrained than her brother. We built up to this moment where she’s in the kitchen, and she doesn’t want Ed [Ben Shenkman] to come in because she knows that if he comes in, it means that her brother is dead, and she can’t take any more loss. Grace had been circling and circling all morning, being quiet in a room by herself, and then she just completely unloaded and broke down. You saw the full breadth of what she’d been doing all summer—playing this restraint and playing this reserve—all collapsing and flowing out onto Ed. The entire cast cried as we were doing that.

Some of the Kennedys and others featured on the show have been vocal about their distaste for Love Story. This is the most emotional and intense episode of the series. Are you prepared for the Kennedy family’s reaction to the episode? Are you prepared for the world’s reaction?

Simpson: Throughout this process, we’ve tried to approach all the characters with sincerity. Our writers, Connor, Ryan, and the producers—we all love these characters, and we have great respect for the Kennedy family. It’s been an honor to bring JFK Jr. and Carolyn to a generation who maybe didn’t know them as well. I hope we’ve done right by them.

Jacobson: That really sums it up. I think it’s hard to miss how much we love the characters. It’s a love story. It’s pretty critical that you really love them, and you really want them to be together. Anytime you’re dealing with people whose lives are real, you never know whether you can ever do right by people in that regard, no matter how hard you try. I think it’s hard not to look at how much affection and devotion we’ve had to these characters. All we can do is hope that that comes through: that we’ve done it with respect and a very earnest, open heart.

Simpson: We wanted to make a sincere show in a cynical time, and a show that brought people together.

The show has become a bit of a cultural phenomenon. What is it like seeing Love Story take to the streets?

Jacobson: When even people’s dogs are wearing backward Kangol hats, you feel like you’ve really managed to touch the culture. It’s been incredible. We especially love the cross-generational viewing, cross-generational experiences. Also, I love how much it hasn’t just been a show for women. Many men have been into the show, men who might not even think of themselves as being into a love story. I also think it’s been very interesting to see people reflecting on the time. It’s a very romantic version of the ’90s, this pre-9/11, pre-social-media [world].

Love Story has minted new stars in Paul Anthony Kelly and Sarah Pidgeon. How does it feel to have been responsible for discovering them?

Simpson: Ryan always had this idea when we were casting the show. He said, “I want to see posters up and down Sunset [Boulevard] in the style of Herb Ritts—black and white—that look like a magazine ad from the 1990s. And I want there to be two unknowns in those ads that you can project anything onto, not somebody that you had a preexisting awareness of, who you were like, Oh, there’s blankety-blank playing JFK Jr.” It really was a guiding vision. And they aren’t unknowns anymore, obviously. If anything, they’re going to be having to deal with the fact that they’ve made such an indelible impression as them… think about when you saw Richard Gere and Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, or you saw a couple together that just worked in such an incredible way. It’s great. And they both have such talent that I think the world is theirs.

They both are such hard workers, and they both come from such different backgrounds to the craft: Sarah, coming through Broadway and doing intensive training; Paul, struggling for so long and giving up and finally making it. I worry about all the people on the internet who are saying they want to see them only together in every movie and TV show from now on. That’s obviously not possible [laughs].

Jacobson: They have both worked to get to where they are, and are getting to experience it at a time where they both also have the character strength and the integrity as human beings to actually enjoy it and not be made crazy by it. We’re thrilled to see them embraced and celebrated this way, but it’s also nice to see that they actually have the means to enjoy it and not feel overwhelmed by it or fundamentally changed. They’re still the same two people who we cast.

What has Ryan Murphy’s reaction been to the series?

Simpson: We had a Ryan Murphy–verse crossover party where Kaia Gerber and some of the cast of [forthcoming FX show] The Shards were there with our cast of Love Story, and everyone’s getting along. I think Ryan’s always so busy that it’s rare for him to take a moment and just relax and enjoy and celebrate. And I think he did.

We hoped it would be embraced. We’re all surprised by how big it is. I think Ryan is surprised too. It’s just so hard in this era to get a collective conversation going. We’re also trying to figure out how to keep the band together, the sort of Altman-esque group of actors who want to keep working together in some way or another.

What does the future of Love Story look like? Creator Connor Hines teased that he thought Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton might make a great couple for season two.

Simpson: We have different ideas that we’re brewing. After O.J., we really took a swerve toward Versace and did something very different and didn’t just try to do another famous case. I think we’re looking at a Love Story that is a little bit out of left field, a little bit different. That’s all I can say. I think that it’s going to be hard to top this in terms of a classic real-life couple.

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