In FX’s Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette, Sarah Pidgeon took on the role of a woman so iconic that the actor’s hair color sparked a major furor before a single frame had even aired. Alongside Paul Anthony Kelly as JFK Jr., Pidgeon plunged back in time to 1990s Manhattan, and a pre-smartphone era of cigarettes, minimalist fashion and crazed paparazzi, to play the couple akin to American royalty. Now, a few months after Love Story first hit screens, Pidgeon reflects on her experience, with insights from Kelly, creator Connor Hines, director Max Winkler and Grace Gummer, who plays Caroline Kennedy. From winning over a highly suspicious fandom, to shooting on the street amid screaming fans, to addressing the responses of Daryl Hannah and JFK Jr.’s nephew Jack Schlossberg, this is the story of the making of a mega-hit.

My first thought upon seeing Sarah Pidgeon is she’s so tall. In fact, at 5’10” she’s not that much taller than me, but meeting her in person on the red carpet at the Actor Awards in March, my impression is of a 6-foot supermodel. As we talk, I realize it’s her personality, her vibe as it were, that’s creating this illusion. It’s as if I need to tilt my head back to absorb it all — she has none of the standard famous-person patina of reserve and the conversation feels warm and almost conspiratorial, like friendship even, which is weird for a two-minute chat.

In the weeks following, Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette will climb from FX hit status to global phenomenon. Multiple real-life accounts of Bessette will be shared, most of them citing her enormous charisma and warmth; her ability to make others feel absolutely seen. I’ll think back to that brief meeting with Pidgeon and wonder exactly how Love Story EP Ryan Murphy and creator Connor Hines found an actor with those exact same qualities.

Later, I’ll ask Hines this very question and even he seems shocked at the serendipity of casting Pidgeon, whom he and Murphy found before Kelly. “You could tell the other characters in that world were feeling the magic of Carolyn and the magic of Sarah,” he says. “And that’s impossible to conjure in my mind. And yet Sarah Pidgeon was able to do it so seamlessly… I was honestly less concerned with finding somebody that looked exactly like Carolyn Bessette, because what they needed was that magical X factor, that swagger, that agency, that self-possession, and that’s not really something that a lot of people can just generate.”

It’s been a couple of months since we met at the Actor Awards, and Pidgeon and I are on a couch in a green room at Deadline’s Los Angeles HQ. “I’ve had about five espressos,” she says happily. Last night she was at a Disney showcase event, then there was this morning’s 7 a.m. call-time for the Deadline shoot and now she’s due at the airport in two hours. She’s also shooting a film in Australia, but more on that later. Curled up in a hoodie and comfy pants, she rattles the bag of sour candy in her lap. “Want some?” she says.

I can’t imagine what it’s been like for her these past few months. Bessette has had almost mythical status ever since she first appeared with JFK Jr. back in the ’90s — partly for the American princess factor of it all, but also for her insouciant and specific personal style. Even before Love Story sparked a fresh wave of appreciation, endless Pinterest boards and dedicated Instagram accounts paid homage to her singularity and elegance. How does a person attempt to step into the hallowed Manolos of a woman so revered; a woman whose life was so tragically cut short in the plane crash that also took JFK Jr. and Bessette’s sister Lauren?

I ask Pidgeon about her recent appearance on Jimmy Kimmel.

“I was nervous,” she says.

I point out that she seemed totally at ease. “It’s like a duck. I try to be still, but underneath my feet are like…” She waggles her hands.

The reason Kimmel has come up is because in that interview she told him she wanted to be a dermatologist as a kid. Obviously, I want to know more. “I think I just liked the idea of picking at skin,” she says. “I mean, being really honest.” Interestingly, she’d also wanted to be a fashion designer back then. “I would just draw the same dress over and over and over again,” she says. That dress had a square neck and spaghetti straps and “a bit of a ’90s silhouette.” It sounds exactly like something Bessette herself would wear while working at Calvin Klein. It’s a weird piece of kismet — a bit of woo-woo manifestation, as it were.

Pidgeon says she’s only just had time to absorb the huge impact of the show and seems shy at the suggestion that she’s famous now. “I feel funny talking about fame, because I don’t necessarily feel that in my lived experience,” she says. No one bothers her in her home city of New York and she’s been so busy, she hasn’t really had time to just be normal and walk down the street.

It took going all the way to Australia, and some quiet time between takes on her new film, Honeymoon With Harry, for everything to really land emotionally.

“I was really bracing for this shock wave, and then it finally hit me,” she says. The film is shooting in Brisbane, with a script from Dan Fogelman. Pidgeon plays Haley, the daughter of Harry (Kevin Costner), who finds himself on honeymoon with his would-be son-in-law Todd (Jake Gyllenhaal). It was on the set that the Love Story aftermath all “finally clicked,” Pidgeon says, but “there’s not a timeline, I think, to contextualizing this show or what it means for my life or my career. Just to take that space has been really lovely. I’ve had such a good time,” she says of Honeymoon With Harry. “There’s just a great group of people. It’s my third project in Oz. I did I Know What You Did Last Summer there, and The Wilds Season 2 there. I love shooting there.” Notwithstanding the somewhat intimidating local wildlife, that is. “I actually have a photo of this giant spider about six inches away from my face,” she says. “After I took the picture, the crew guy was like, ‘Mate, these things jump.’”

When she first met Murphy and Hines, Pidgeon was not an unknown quantity. Aside from her film and TV projects, including Hulu’s Tiny Beautiful Things and playing Bill Murray’s grieving daughter in the film The Friend, her Tony-nominated turn in the hit Broadway play Stereophonic surely made every casting director snap to attention.

Says Hines: “I’d heard people rave about Sarah once I asked around about her, but she just has this power that she generates from within that’s both magical and seemingly effortless, that makes her what I believe is a true superstar and one of the finest actors, I think, of her generation. She’s a talent, but it’s also a gift, and I don’t even think she’s that aware that she possesses it. I think she just thinks she’s just acting. And then I’m like, ‘What you’re doing is something else and I can’t even articulate it.’”

Pidgeon’s first impression of the Bessette role was from reading the logline ahead of her audition. “The character description was, ‘She’s not an ice queen.’” This, it turned out, was something Hines had been dead set upon from the beginning of his deep research and reading.

“Some of the narrative that surrounded her was a bit misogynistic and I think reductive,” he says, “but you could extract what you think the reality was in a non-biased way if you removed the misogynistic lens from some of those books. They would describe her as calculated, which I would be like, ‘That’s ambition for her.’” The idea that Bessette was some sort of wannabe was anathema for Hines.

She’d been sometimes cast as “a gold digger where it’s like she’s a vixen or she’s a maneater,” he continues. “A maneater through the lens of misogyny is just a woman that’s not particularly interested in you. It was this idea of, ‘Well, she was flirtatious.’ And it’s like, ‘Was she flirtatious, or was that your perception? Was she charming, and you wished it was flirtation?’ So, it was a lot of going through all of those accounts and dissecting them. And extracting the truth through what felt like a pretty reductive and myopic lens.”

Probably the most important thing that happened for me on that shoot was when Sarah and I were speaking on the phone and she was having a moment, because she had to sign off of Instagram. Everybody was checking on her to see if she was OK. I was waking up to emails from my girlfriends and gay friends saying, ‘How could you do this? You’ve ruined her.’ It was a really dark time, as ridiculous as it may seem.

Max Winkler, Director

Hines grew up in Connecticut, in a neighboring town to Bessette’s Old Greenwich home, and that proximity fed his interest. “I so related to her drive to want to make something of herself,” he says. He also found an affinity with Bessette’s move to Manhattan.

“I’m somebody that started as a caterer and a waiter, moving to New York with big ambitions that might seem outsized to other people, but I just had this desire that I wanted to be close to people that were creative, that were making things that excited me. And to think about her working at the mall in Newton, folding sweaters, and then ascending the corporate ladder at Calvin Klein, and just the agency that she had, honestly, it sounds so cliché, but I really just found myself falling in love with their individual stories as I was reading about them, and also just how human they were. We lionized them and we glorify them, but they had their battles and their wounds and the emotional voids that the rest of us endure.”

Pidgeon herself had also made that move to New York, working odd jobs in pursuit of her passions. “I nannied,” she says. “I worked at a cocktail bar. I wasn’t a bartender and they never fully promoted me to waiter. I did a lot of bussing tables.”

From the beginning, Pidgeon says, “I knew how important Carolyn was to people before I really knew anything about her.” She listened endlessly to the audio book of Elizabeth Beller’s Once Upon a Time: The Captivating Life of Caroyln Bessette-Kennedy. And once the word was out that she’d gotten the role, people would stop Pidgeon on the street, or at dinner in New York to tell her what they remembered about Bessette. She also pored over Sunita Kumar Nair’s Carolyn Bessette: A Life in Fashion. “Obviously, the main focus [of that book] was her sartorial choices and influence, but there were these really amazing portrait shots of Carolyn. She was so expressive. Her eyes had this intensity and openness and depending on the shot, you got these different impressions of her.”

All of it added up to a weighty task. “I put a lot of pressure on myself,” she says. Plus, the show touched on Bessette’s time in New York prior to meeting Kennedy — a period without much documentation. “I don’t think any part of making the show was particularly easy. From a research point of view, from the beginning, there’s not a whole lot of information on her. She was an incredibly private person, and my impression was that the people that she was closest to maintained her privacy, even in her passing. I wanted to avoid feeling like I was imitating, or doing an impression of her, and wanting to try and capture something while having less information than I would want was scary.”

We are so, so lucky that they spoke out and that those images got leaked, because without it, we could have been doing the whole thing wrong, and then that all would’ve happened in the trailer. It’s the greatest thing to ever happen to us.

Max Winkler, Director

Then there was the long search for the right JFK Jr. actor. When Paul Anthony Kelly auditioned, Murphy and Hines knew within minutes the role was his. “It happened so quickly,” Pidgeon says. “It was so clear that it was him. When I met Paul, 16 hours later he had the job.” And they let Pidgeon be the one to tell him the good news. 

At the time, Kelly had been about ready to quit trying to be an actor and go back home to Canada. He’d put in 12 years of trying, and now here was Pidgeon telling him that at last, it had happened for him. “I kind of disassociated from the world, because I had finally landed a big one,” he says. And he and Pidgeon seemed to immediately connect. “It was just an absolute understanding of like, ‘I’ve got you. I know you’ve got me. Let’s do this.’”

Hines was similarly blown away by getting to live his dream. “I’d written 30 scripts that have not seen the light of day — pilots and features. I’ve been at this since I was 24 years old, so it’s been a long journey. But I will say being a part of this show, it felt like I was supposed to be a part of it in a way that I’ve never really felt creatively. As soon as I knew Ryan was doing this anthology, I’ve never really felt so called to be a part of something in all of my years out here. I still am kind of pinching myself that it was actually produced. I’m so used to writing something and then it’s sitting in my desk, or people being like, ‘We really loved it, but what else are you working on?’”

But then came the leaked test shots.

Last June, the internet was suddenly aflame with outrage after images emerged of initial looks for Pidgeon and Kelly in character. Fashion experts and even associates of Bessette and JFK Jr. positively slammed the clothing and hair choices. Pidgeon’s hair was the wrong shade; the clothes looked off. Why hadn’t they borrowed the right things from designers?

Refreshingly, Max Winkler, who directed the entire show, is grateful for that fallout.

“We are so, so lucky that they spoke out and that those images got leaked, because without it, we could have been doing the whole thing wrong, and then that all would’ve happened in the trailer. It’s the greatest thing to ever happen to us.”

But the outcry was extremely rough on Pidgeon, he says. “It was brutal, but it was really the hardest on Sarah, because we hadn’t gotten the test stuff right. It was our fault. It wasn’t hers. And also, at that point, we were still messing around trying to make it work with a wig, because we had so many looks. We only had to reshoot a couple of days of filming.”

Winkler remembers a phone conversation he had with Pidgeon during that difficult time. “Probably the most important thing that happened for me on that shoot was when Sarah and I were speaking on the phone and she was having a moment, because she had to sign off of Instagram. Everybody was checking on her to see if she was OK. I was waking up to emails from my girlfriends and gay friends saying, ‘How could you do this? You’ve ruined her.’ It was a really dark time, as ridiculous as it may seem.”

He continues, “I was having a really hard time once, and somebody with more experience than me, who I really trust, read me this quote by Martha Graham, which is one of my favorite quotes about the creative process ever.” He’s referring to Graham’s words to Agnes de Mille, which read in part: There is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to decide how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. 

He read this aloud to Pidgeon over the phone. “We both started crying,” he says. “And I think that was a very seminal moment for both of us in moving forward and trying, in the face of this type of thing. I’ll always remember that phone conversation very, very fondly.”

Enter hair designer Barry Lee Moe (Pam & Tommy, Pose) to save the day. Pidgeon’s naturally dark hair was then expertly colored by Kari Hill in a laborious 20-hour process that took over two days.

Says Winkler, “We brought stylists in who were really, really helpful, to set-up, just so we could start figuring out and archiving and getting real clothes. Because a lot of places, a lot of the houses, originally wouldn’t lend us clothes.” Winkler also credits stylist Jamie Mizrahi and creative director/designer Simone Harouche. “They were very, very helpful in opening up doors for us. We ended up getting it right.”

As for why they couldn’t get those vital clothes on loan before, Winkler says, “I think Carolyn is such a holy subject, for good reason. There’s this unexplained, incredible effortlessness in everything she ever put on that touches people so much, and they have every right to protect her the way they did.”

Winkler has worked with Murphy many times, as director and executive producer of Grotesquerie, on multiple installments of American Horror Story, and on Monster and Feud. Murphy told Winkler early on, “I want this to feel like a valentine to New York City in that time period.” Winkler says, “I’ve always kept that in my head. Like a director to an actor, that kind of unlocked it to me. He would say, ‘When they meet at the fundraiser, I want it to feel like Tony and Maria seeing each other in West Side Story.’”

Winkler, his longtime DP Jason McCormick and production designer Alex DiGerlando set to work with that West Side Story scene in mind. Winkler says their collective thought was, “What’s the documentary realism version of that in 1992 or 1994 in New York City, where they’re the only two people in the room, where they don’t get on a rotating carousel, but it feels like that? And the Kate Bush song came in editorial, which also really, really helped me. It’s the third time I’ve used Kate Bush, so she’s like my good luck charm. Another thing Ryan said was, ‘And what if there were missed connections? What if they kept missing each other?’ And then we started talking about Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet.”

For some reason when I first started working on this show, I just assumed there would be an endless trove of couples to chronicle,” says Hines. “And once you do John and Carolyn… Honestly, it’s a very tough act to follow.

Connor Hines, creator of Love Story

They also thought about the way New York feels in Working Girl and Tootsie: “Like you can smell it, you can feel it. And there’s a lot of corners in New York City where it doesn’t look that different minus a Starbucks or some signage. If you’re looking up, a lot of those buildings are the exact same, so it’s not horrible to shoot a period piece here. Jason and I also looked at a lot of William Eggleston street photography, and I just wanted it to be devoid of pretension or anything that was a ‘nice shot.’ I wanted it to have a sense that it was just very, very alive, especially because in so much of the pilot, you’re seeing through both of their perspectives.

“I wanted her New York and his New York to just feel very, very specific and distinct. Those were conversations I’d had with [executive producers] Brad [Simpson] and Nina [Jacobson] and Ryan and Connor. And when we’re with her, I really wanted to move with her. Her walk, and the way she occupies space is so important. The character of Carolyn was such a tactile person, really from all of our accounts, the city was so much her playground. Whether we were at The Box or on her walk to work, which is obviously such an important moment, to get that walk right, in the city, the feel of it, of those to-go-cup coffees and your first cigarette of the day.”

They shot on sound stages in Green Point, Brooklyn and on Long Island. But it was incorporating the streets of Manhattan that paid off in spades — despite being a notoriously difficult place to shoot.

“It’s worth it,” Winkler says. “It’s so worth it for the production value you get and the aliveness everyone feels when you’re making a shot in New York. There’s such stakes to it.”

But on the street, they had a voracious audience of bystanders to manage. “Because the project really made its way to a lot of people, there was oftentimes hundreds of people outside waiting and watching. And we have two actors. Sarah’s very experienced, but not like Anne Hathaway making Devil Wears Prada 2. And Paul is very inexperienced, and so they had to perform and act and do some of these really intimate scenes, like their first kiss and their first meeting, and seeing each other through the paparazzi line at the function, and coming outside of the Indian restaurant for the first time, with hundreds of people screaming and trying to get photographs.”

But perhaps that rather meta experience of what Bessette and Kennedy must have felt on the street actually fed the project. “They really were our Princess Di and Charles in a lot of ways.” In an early scene in the pilot, a nervous Carolyn is getting a manicure. There’s a sense of the paparazzi trying to shoot her through the salon windows and she seems almost hunted. “The same way The Crown had made Princess Di start to feel like she was a prisoner in the most beautiful, gilded cage, that’s what we were thinking about when we set up that nail salon at the beginning.”

To perfect the physicality of the characters, both Pidgeon and Kelly worked with movement coach Julia Crockett. For Pidgeon, this meant a lot of walking in the equivalent of Bessette’s shoes. “There were a lot of Manolos,” she says, “and I could not imagine leaving my house in a pair of heels. I’ve tried a few times. When I got the role, Julia was like, ‘You need to go walk around the streets in heels.’ I was like, ‘That sounds like the worst thing I’ve ever heard.’” 

But aside from that struggle, Pidgeon delightedly absorbed Bessette’s style. “The Yohji [Yamamoto] outfits were my favorite, and a lot of Prada,” she says. “I mean, I guess I look like a slob right now — for the readers at home, I’m in a sweatshirt — but I think I find myself gravitating towards simple dressing and really having a closet that feels cohesive and comfortable. So, I also think walking around New York and seeing people in maybe a Carolyn-inspired outfit, it’s also like, ‘You live in the city and you’re probably walking a mile or two every single day.’”

To the uninitiated Kelly, Pidgeon became a kind of mentor. “She’s been in it for a little while and I have great admiration for her work,” he says, but this was my first job, my first major role. So, at times I felt like I was a little in over my head. But she was always there to even the keel as it were and just support me. It made me feel more comfortable being so vulnerable.”

For Grace Gummer, playing Caroline Kennedy meant sharing several key scenes with Pidgeon, as Carolyn tries hard to push down the Kennedy barriers and connect with JKF Jr.’s sister. “Sarah’s an incredible actor,” Gummer says. “She’s totally with you. She’s listening. She’s present. And what I loved so much about working with her is that she had so many ideas. She’s a collaborative scene partner. After every take, she asked me what I thought, she asked me if I had any ideas; what we could do differently. It felt like she’s interested in building something with me in that moment instead of just only figuring it out for herself. She’s a goofy, silly, disarming, incredible woman and friend, and transformed every time the camera was rolling. She embodied her interpretation of Carolyn with such confidence and force and bravery. It was really cool to watch.”

Now, in the aftermath, legions of fans are basking in the glow of Love Story’s depiction of a legendary romance, wrapped up in nostalgia and style. Considering that many worried this was a story that could not be replicated in any way, how does Hines feel about the show’s impact?

“I’ve had so many friends reach out that are like, ‘I think I’m going to change the way I live my life.’ And, ‘When it comes to dating, I’m not going to settle for anything less than a romantic pursuit that’s with flowers, and I want you to call and don’t just send me a DM.’”

I tell him I wish them all luck. “I know. Me too,” he says.

Of course, we all know that Love Story has a shocking, desperately tragic ending. The grief of that settled on Pidgeon personally in some ways. In the show’s final episode, Gummer faces Constance Zimmer as Bessette’s mother, Ann Freeman, a woman who has just lost both her daughters. Says Pidgeon, “I was so affected by the second half of the episode with Grace Gummer and Constance Zimmer. Those scenes were just so heartbreaking. I think watching it back, I realized, ‘Oh, maybe that’s why I struggled.’ I think it was, ‘How does one finish…’ I guess that wasn’t really part of my job. I wasn’t meant to finish the story.”

I knew it was a very serious responsibility, and I took it as seriously as possible and it was not lost on me at any point making this show that we were dealing with sensitive subject matters and real people. I believe I can stand by the fact that my intention and Ryan’s intention and the producers and the other writers was to truly approach every component of this series with as much sensitivity as possible.

Connor Hines, creator of Love Story

There would be an unhappy outcome of the show itself to face too. In a New York Times op-ed published in early March, Daryl Hannah slammed the show. Hannah, who was JFK Jr.’s longtime girlfriend before Bessette, is portrayed by Dree Hemingway on screen, and among other things, is seen snorting cocaine from an heirloom silver plate belonging to the Kennedy family. She wrote in part of her depiction: The character ‘Daryl Hannah’ portrayed in the series is not even a remotely accurate representation of my life, my conduct or my relationship with John. The actions and behaviors attributed to me are untrue… I have never used cocaine in my life or hosted cocaine-fueled parties. I have never pressured anyone into marriage. I have never desecrated any family heirloom or intruded upon anyone’s private memorial. I have never planted any story in the press. I never compared Jacqueline Onassis’ death to a dog’s. It’s appalling to me that I even have to defend myself against a television show. These are not creative embellishments of personality. They are assertions about conduct — and they are false.

Also in early March, Jack Schlossberg, who is JKF Jr.’s nephew and Caroline Kennedy’s son, told CBS Sunday Morning that the show was a “grotesque display of someone else’s life.” Then in mid-April, he told Katie Couric on her Next Question podcast that he and his mother had watched a clip of Love Story together. “We were laughing so hard,” he said, “as if that’s how my mom acts.”

When I ask her how she felt hearing these reactions, Pidgeon says, “I feel very strongly that they have every right to their opinion and every right to share it, and I don’t know the first thing about what it’s like to have a TV show portrayed about my life. It was never lost on me that I was portraying a real person, and that people who knew her and loved her are still with us today.”

Hines’ take on it is this: “I knew it was a very serious responsibility, and I took it as seriously as possible and it was not lost on me at any point making this show that we were dealing with sensitive subject matters and real people. I believe I can stand by the fact that my intention and Ryan’s intention and the producers and the other writers was to truly approach every component of this series with as much sensitivity as possible. And that was the objective. How something is perceived is obviously beyond my control, all I can control is my intention. I know that the only reason I wanted to do this show is because I loved everybody in that world truly and had so much reverence for everyone. And that’s what drove me creatively — to be authentic, but to be compassionate. And I know that that was what I set out to do and what the rest of our team set out to do, and I trust that.”

As for the future of Love Story and what comes next in Murphy’s anthology, recent reports have suggested Hines is working on an installment about Liz Taylor and Richard Burton. However, Hines says nothing is set at all on that front. “That’s a conversation for Ryan Murphy. I threw it out there as a very hypothetical suggestion, but at the end of the day, this is his anthology, so if he would want to do it, great, but it’s up to him.”

Perhaps one of the reasons this story of JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette has captured so many and for so long, is, rather sadly, the sheer lack of truly iconic love stories that exist. “For some reason when I first started working on this show, I just assumed there would be an endless trove of couples to chronicle,” says Hines. “And once you do John and Carolyn… Honestly, it’s a very tough act to follow.”

Pidgeon’s team are tapping on the door. It’s time to head to the airport. But first, she hugs and thanks everyone. Then she’s off, in her chic airport outfit, somehow radiating both warmth and an elegant mystique. I wonder what Carolyn would have thought of her. I like to imagine they might have been friends.

Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette is currently streaming on FX/ Hulu.

Sarah Pidgeon shot on location in Los Angeles at PMC Studios.

Executive Awards Editor: Antonia Blyth; Design Director: Fah Sakharet; Video Director: Benjamin Bloom; Senior Video Producer: Jade Collins; Designer: Paige Petersen; Photographer: Josh Telles; 1st assistant: Gal Harpaz; 2nd assistant: Paolo Alfante.