The scrutiny was unlike anything Pidgeon had faced in her career thus far. “I’ve never been working on something while knowing that there is a conversation being had about it,” she says. “This process has been about figuring out how I navigate that. I’ve come to understand that I just have to focus on the story that we’re telling.” Ever the supportive scene partner, Kelly agrees: “I think it really shows how much people care,” he says of the hoopla. “It shows that people are excited for it, which reignites my excitement for it—getting to go to work and breathe life into these characters. I think people are going to be really happy with what we’ve done, what we’ve created here.”
Derogatory discourse isn’t the only noise they’ve had to shut out. The same year Pidgeon and Kelly shot Love Story, President Donald Trump tapped Robert F. Kennedy Jr., John’s cousin, to lead the Department of Health and Human Services—giving the former lawyer a powerful platform to promote conspiracy theories about the supposed dangers of vaccines, fluoride, seed oils, and Tylenol, among other things. Jack Schlossberg, John’s nephew, is on the opposite side of the ideological spectrum—and recently announced that he’s running for Congress in New York—but has made his disdain for Murphy and the entire Love Story production well-known. In a since-deleted social media post, Schlossberg threatened to come to the Love Story set to give Murphy a piece of his mind. He later told The New York Times that he was “messing around.”
“They’re a very big family. There’s a lot of them,” says Pidgeon when I ask about RFK Jr. and Schlossberg. “I don’t know the first thing about what it’s like to have a story, or stories—” She stops short, reconsiders. “We’re not the first to examine the Kennedys in any way. But it’s really cool to know that we’re doing a project that’s based off a family that is so prevalent.” A nervous Kelly echoes his more seasoned costar: “I now have to piggyback,” he says, after some cajoling. The Kennedys seem to do everything effortlessly—but you can almost see the sweat trickling down Kelly’s neck.
Even the least superstitious among us would be hard-pressed to deny that an abnormal amount of terrible things have happened to the Kennedy family. Joe Jr. died in combat. JFK and RFK were assassinated. John and Carolyn weren’t even the first Kennedys to die tragically in a plane crash. Just weeks ago, John’s niece Tatiana Schlossberg died at the age of 35, after a battle with acute myeloid leukemia. Despite this—and despite the tragedies the family bears some responsibility for, like Chappaquiddick and Rosemary’s lobotomy—the Kennedy family’s legacy has stretched far beyond the thousand-odd days JFK served as the nation’s youngest president. Love Story promises to explore that dynasty, diving deep into a dazzling and damned family by way of the Kennedys who may have shined the brightest and suffered the most.