Last June, Ryan Murphy posted stills from what he captioned a camera test for a “romantic and tragic love story” to his Instagram account.
The photos showed the actors Sarah Pidgeon and Paul Anthony Kelly in costume as Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy and John F. Kennedy Jr., the subjects of the first season of “Love Story,” an anthology series premiering Thursday on FX and Hulu. The backlash to the post was swift and bratty, with style writers and even Bessette-Kennedy’s own colorist deriding the look as cheap, the Temu version of high fashion. This was not the kind of tragic Murphy had in mind. (The post has since been deleted.)
Pidgeon, 29, tried to stay off the internet in those days. The role is the most prominent of her career, and she didn’t want the chatter to cow her or color her performance. (For what it’s worth, the hair color was subsequently fixed.)
Still, the criticism reached her. She had known already that people had strong opinions about the couple, Bessette-Kennedy in particular, a cool blonde and proto-influencer who died young. Now she understood that these same people would have passionate feelings about every aspect of her performance. This made the part both a thrilling opportunity and a weighty responsibility.
Through her research and preparation, Pidgeon came to care deeply for the woman she imagined Bessette-Kennedy to have been. “There’s so much that’s so admirable,” Pidgeon said. “I wanted to fiercely advocate for that interpretation of her, that she’s more than just her clothes.”
Pidgeon, casually dressed in a black sweater and dark jeans, was speaking on a bitterly cold Sunday afternoon at the start of February. She had asked to meet at a teahouse, a mellow, unglamorous space that promised “mindful living” through the medium of tea. For Pidgeon, this entailed an omakase presentation of a flower tea, a milky oolong, a gardenia green tea and a tea scented with loquat blossoms. Two weeks out from a premiere that seemed likely to intensify an already flourishing career, mellow was probably welcome.
Is Pidgeon mellow? Not exactly. A former theater kid and a graduate of the Interlochen Arts Academy and the conservatory program at Carnegie Mellon, she is affable and animated but also practical. Just after we sat down, she pulled over a space heater, plugging it in at our feet.
“We can just cook ourselves a little bit,” she said.
After chatting with her for a couple of hours, I didn’t feel that I knew her, but that elusiveness is part of her appeal. Daniel Aukin, who directed Pidgeon in the Broadway play “Stereophonic,” described her as “really protean.”
“She’s so constantly surprising that I don’t put anything past her,” he said.
Pidgeon has always taken acting seriously. She remembers playing a preschool Virgin Mary in a church pageant and tattling on her Joseph for his mishandling of the prop baby. She liked everything about theater — the community, the dress-up, the mild stage fright — and so she kept doing it.
She snagged an agent right out of college and was cast a few months later in her first series, as a marooned teen in the Amazon series “The Wilds.” That led to a role as the younger version of Kathryn Hahn’s Clare in the Hulu limited series “Tiny Beautiful Things.”
Her next major role brought her back to the stage. In David Adjmi’s play “Stereophonic,” which began at Playwrights Horizons before transferring to Broadway, she played Diana, a singer in a Fleetwood Mac-adjacent band. Diana’s commitment to her artistry, a commitment rimmed in self-doubt, felt personal to Pidgeon, who was nominated for a Tony.
Brad Simpson, an executive producer of “Love Story,” saw her in the role. “I’ve never seen such vulnerability onstage,” he said in a recent conversation, which made him receptive to her “Love Story” audition months later.
Pidgeon was only a toddler when Bessette-Kennedy died in 1999 at age 33, when a plane piloted by her husband crashed into the ocean. She knew her the way that many younger millennials did, through paparazzi photos, which meant that Bessette-Kennedy remained mostly mysterious to her. So Pidgeon played that mystery in her auditions. Simpson and the other producers had anticipated an extensive search to find their Carolyn, but within minutes of Pidgeon’s callback, the search was over. This was partly because of that slight remove.
“You immediately feel like you know her but also feel like you can never truly get to know her,” Simpson said. “She has a warmth but also a distance.”
Though a favorite of photographers, Bessette-Kennedy gave very few interviews in her lifetime, which makes her both overexposed and underknown. Elizabeth Beller, whose book “Once Upon a Time: The Captivating Life of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy” is an inspiration for the series, spent years researching her. Those sidewalk photos, Beller wrote in an email, don’t convey Bessette-Kennedy’s enthusiasm and joie de vivre.
“She was so different than the ice princess the media conveyed at the time,” Beller said. “Those very photographs that captured her style also flattened her into myth.”
Pidgeon tried to go beyond the photos and the myth. Yes, the hair, makeup and wardrobe, much improved since those disastrous early test photos, meant that she was more able to step into Bessette-Kennedy’s shoes. “Literally, in some Manolos,” Pidgeon said. But she wasn’t trying to mirror Bessette-Kennedy exactly.
“My face is my face,” she said. “It was more exciting to me to bring an interpretation of this woman who had this strong essence.”
She held onto certain tangibles — Bessette-Kennedy’s perfume, her brand of cigarettes. She also paid attention to how friends had described her — her spunk, her smarts, her intense eyes, her tendency to talk with her hands.
While Pidgeon would rather not have gone through the outcry over the test photos and the subsequent paparazzi interest in the shoot, that helped with the performance, too, as a milder version of the scrutiny Bessette-Kennedy experienced.
“I recognize that I was filming a TV show and she was trying to exist, to walk her dog,” Pidgeon said. “But I knew what it felt like for me to suddenly realize that I was being watched in that way.”
That realization was mostly internal. Kelly, Pidgeon’s co-star, rarely saw that stress affect her.
“She’s so talented, and she works hard for everything, but she is as cool as a cucumber,” Kelly said.
Pidgeon didn’t have much time to metabolize the sudden internet infamy. The five-month shoot, which took the characters from courtship to death, moved quickly.
“I didn’t have a moment to step back and assess,” she said. “I really had to just keep betting on myself and what my instincts were.”
She was speaking in the days before the reviews and audience reactions, so she didn’t yet know if that bet had paid off. The most Pidgeon would say about her performance and how well it captured the real Bessette-Kennedy was that she felt she had achieved an honorable compromise — “a solid sort of negotiation” — between the real woman and the show’s character.
Mostly she hoped that “Love Story” would supply an internal life for a fashion favorite, depicting Bessette-Kennedy as a woman who was more than an image in a glossy paparazzi photo. More, finally, than just her clothes.
Alexis Soloski has written for The Times since 2006. As a culture reporter, she covers television, theater, movies, podcasts and new media.
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