A Star Is Born

When Love Story was released, it had us in a vice-like grip. Ryan Murphy’s retelling of the romantic tragedy of John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette belongs to a strangely frenzy-inducing category of television in which culture reanimates people who were already mythologized in life, offering them up for consumption all over again. We saw a previous version of this dynamic when The Crown was airing. There seems to be a particular allure to dramatizing women whose royal-adjacence is potent, but whose mystique partly rests on how little was ever truly accessible.

There are echoes with Pidgeon’s own experience. Although she is quick to draw a distinction – “I want to make it very clear that I know she was a woman trying to live her life, and I’m an actor on a TV show” – she admits there are moments where the division becomes hazy. Invitations are rolling in; TikTok is awash with pastiche as women do the Bessette hair toss while at the water cooler or in the middle of house chores, and fashion houses like Chanel are offering her ambassadorship positions. “I’ve been thinking about her a lot,” Pidgeon says. “There is this weird sense of art folding itself onto my life. Everything is happening quickly. I don’t have any sense of perspective right now. I don’t know what any of this means to me, in the greater picture.”

Love Story is the kind of rigorous, character-driven work Pidgeon has been building towards. From her training at the ultra-prestigious Carnegie Mellon School of Drama to performing on Broadway, where she earned a 2024 Tony nomination and a Drama Desk Award for playing Diana in David Adjmi’s Stereophonic, she is an actor of serious chops. There were earlier glimpses of that seriousness on screen – Tiny Beautiful Things opposite Kathryn Hahn, The Friend with Bill Murray and Naomi Watts – but this is the first time she has been given something this expansive, this exacting, to really inhabit. And she knows the value of it.

Still, enormous gratitude doesn’t preclude a little bit of discomfort. She shifts position, her hand drifts from her chin to her chest, then briefly to her forehead, composing the thought before articulating it. “Before the show even came out, we were shooting in New York – which was such a gift, to be able to walk the same streets that they walked together, their old haunts that are still around like The Odeon, Bubby’s, Walker’s – but when you’re shooting in the city, there are just so many onlookers. There was so much public interest in our show. I began to understand that I was being… watched.”

The comparison, again, is carefully measured. The world that produced Carolyn Bessette’s fame has changed; there are, at least in theory, more guardrails now. Tighter regulations around how public figures can be pursued. But the mechanics of visibility have evolved in ways that are harder to contain. “Everyone has a phone now so, in a way, everyone can be paparazzi,” Pidgeon says. “I suppose in some ways you could evade the paparazzi at an earlier time. You could hide out, or take the back door, but now it’s much easier for your immediate location to be shared and therefore, hope of access being granted to people.” She pauses, then adds, “It’s been lovely to have people come up and say, ‘I really like the show,’ but I hope that I will never be in the position that Carolyn was in, where she couldn’t walk her dog down the street without having to run away.”

And then there is Paul Anthony Kelly (JFK Jr. in the show), who she thinks about with something approaching relief. Their trajectories, she notes, have unfolded in tandem, both propelled suddenly into a new orbit. “Paul’s the best. I could not have hoped for a better companion, not only in this chapter that we’re in now, but really doing it together. He’s the closest person who understands my experience of life now.” She describes him as constant and instinctively generous. The kind of person who anticipates what’s needed before it’s asked. “Here’s a typical Paul-ism,” she says. “I had to wear a lot of different heels and was constantly changing in and out of them, and he always had his hand out, so that I could hold onto him and fix my shoes. And now, as we’ve been doing this press circuit, somehow, without me even really asking for it, there’s a hand there when I’m looking for one.” She smiles. “He’s such a considerate, kind person. I hope that this is the beginning of a very long friendship and collaboration.”

Those small, human moments are a nice foil to the show’s broader cultural draw, which is often attributed to the clothes. The crisp Calvin Klein shirts and sharp tailoring. The now-infamous Prada camel coat that recently sold for $192,000 at auction. Furor around the decision to beat up an Hermès Birkin bag. For Pidgeon, though, our fascination with the ’90s runs deeper than just fashion. “In talking to people who were in their twenties in the ’90s, I’ve heard it was such a special time,” she says. “It was before smartphones. Nowadays, at any party, any bar, any restaurant, if there’s a lull in conversation, people pull out their phones. In the ’90s, you just had to talk to people. There was anonymity. A crazy night could stay a crazy night.” She grins. “And then there was Y2K. People were living like it was all about to fall apart.”

If Love Story has broken the seal on a new kind of career future, it’s gushing at her quickly now. Next up is Honeymoon with Harry, alongside Jake Gyllenhaal and Kevin Costner. “I am about to go off and start shooting that,” she says. “I’ve met Jake before, and I’m such a fan of both of theirs. I’m excited to jump into something else.” The ambition beyond that is far-reaching and deliberately undefined. “In 10 or 20 years, I want to be able to look back and see that I’ve worked in so many different genres… that I’ve worked with so many different directors. I hope I feel like a very expansive actor.” She pauses, then lands on something more precise. “I don’t want people to know what a Sarah Pidgeon project is.”

Which brings us back to where we began. There is a sense, listening to her, that when Pidgeon says she never quite “got” Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, she could just as easily have been speaking about herself. She admits that somewhere along the way, she lost a little of her voice. “I find it quite uncomfortable to speak up, which has not always been the case. I was constantly talking in class during grade school. I had strong opinions as a child. And then I think as I got into this industry, you can sort of doubt yourself.” She describes a gradual quieting that developed, surrounded by Hollywood’s impressive but imposing figures.

And yet, in playing Bessette, something has started to crystalize. “By seeing how unafraid she was to really go after what she wanted – she really believed in her vision – I was inspired by that self-possession to find more of that in myself.” If there is a message she hopes prevails, it is a simple one. “She was known for being just this one thing, and she was that, but she was so much more than that.”

The same, it seems, could be said of Pidgeon too.

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