There’s a moment near the end of Love Story that has stuck with people. Caroline Kennedy and Ann Messina Freeman — Carolyn Bessette’s mother, played by Constance Zimmer — sit at opposite ends of a long table, two women bound together by an unthinkable loss. By the end of the scene, they are holding hands.
That final gesture wasn’t in the script.
“It was my instinct to go over there and take her hand,” says Grace Gummer, who plays Caroline in Ryan Murphy‘s nine-episode FX limited series. “We can’t know what happened in real life, but our interpretation of these events are what you see. And I think it’s a beautiful way to end the show — on these two women who share this loss together.”
Creator and executive producer Connor Hines texted her when he finished writing it. “He said, ‘I just wrote you the saddest scene in the history of television.'” Gummer and Zimmer had history going in — they first worked together in 2014 on The Newsroom. “There was this beautiful connective tissue between us,” she says. “We really just listened to each other, looked at each other. We left nothing on the table and we could have kept going and going and going.”
“To me, that scene says so much about Caroline,” she continues. “Her wisdom and her forbearance, garnered through tragedy after tragedy after tragedy. In the moment, it felt like there were just these waves crashing down on me that would not bring me down.”
The line that has stayed with people — where Caroline tells Ann that condolences have begun to sound like white noise, but sitting across from her, all she wants to say is how sorry she is — hit exactly as written. “What else can you say? It’s two women who’ve lost everything.”
The role came to Gummer the way most do: she auditioned. Then Ryan Murphy called.
“He told me about the part, about how integral she was to the story and to the show as a whole,” Gummer recalls. “The idea of playing a woman of such dignity and integrity and grace and elegance — I really felt like I could relate to her. I felt very honored to be asked to portray her.”
The themes of the show pulled her in, too. “What’s the cost of fame? How do you have a real and normal life in the public eye? The way we obsess and invade and elevate people — everything it dealt with felt very prescient and interesting to me.”
As Meryl Streep’s daughter, Gummer knows something about growing up under a spotlight. “I know what it’s like to feel like people know who you are,” she says. “I can relate to that feeling of being invaded. But I didn’t grow up under the same spotlight as the Kennedys. It’s a completely different world.”
Preparing to play a living person — one as private and formidable as Caroline Kennedy — required a particular kind of research. Gummer read two Kennedy family biographies. Creator Connor Hines sent her an old New Yorker profile that she found especially illuminating. “It just painted a really great picture of what it felt like to be in the room with her,” she says. “So I was able to capture her vibe and her essence through studying and reading and doing research.”
But she’s clear that the script was her real foundation. “The hardest part about playing a real person is presuming to know what I don’t know,” she says. “There’s so much I will never know about her. I can only gather all the information I’ve researched and then present my interpretation, my vision of her, and hope that it elicits some feeling and compassion in the audience. That’s my goal — I think that’s my goal all the time as an artist.”
The character she built is a woman caught between love and duty. After Jackie’s death, the baton passes to Caroline. “She carries a sense of duty to her family, but she’s also a very loving older sister who’s protective of her brother and his wellbeing,” Gummer says. “There’s probably a tendency for her to be misunderstood. But Connor and Ryan and everyone involved were really interested in not only preserving her legacy and honoring her, but telling the truth. And the truth is that she’s incredibly smart and funny and bright and interesting and strong — and not a villain at all.”
The sibling dynamic at the heart of the show required real chemistry with Paul Anthony Kelly, who plays JFK Jr. in what has become a breakout performance. The two of them first crossed paths briefly while Gummer was shooting All’s Fair — Kelly and Sarah Pidgeon were doing hair and makeup tests at the same studio in LA.
“The three of us were in this tiny little room together and it was before anything started, before we read anything, before we knew anything was going to happen,” Gummer recalls. “I just felt like we all felt like kids — innocent kids being like, ‘What are we going to do? This is going to be a big deal.’ But we had no idea it was going to be this kind of big deal, that our lives would essentially change.”
Their first actual scene together was the funeral. No warm-up. No easing in. Just grief, on day one.
“We were coming into something that we hadn’t formed yet,” she says. So before the first take, she improvised. “I just ran out to the hallway and I gave Paul this big hug. I barely knew him — we had only talked for maybe half an hour at most. But I needed that physical, tangible connection with him to be able to start from somewhere.” She pauses. “We just held each other, and there was this unspoken trust and support. I felt like I was implicitly saying, ‘I love you. I’m here for you.'”
Kelly, for his part, has been effusive in his admiration. When Gold Derby asked who he’d give an Emmy to if he could give it to anyone, he said Gummer, without hesitation — adding that she helped walk him through all of it.
“I just love him so much,” she says warmly. “He’s so adorable.”
Then there’s Naomi Watts, who plays Jackie Kennedy Onassis — and who Gummer had just finished working with on All’s Fair.
“That was surreal,” she laughs. “We just laughed about it. We’re really great friends now.” But on set, the awe was real. “To be able to have that kind of scene partner is — career-wise, for me, that’s at the top so far.” She describes one early scene, the two of them sitting alone at a dining room table, where she got so lost watching Watts work that she forgot her lines. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, she’s so good.’ I forgot my line because I was just so taken with her.”
Gummer has worked with Ryan Murphy many times — multiple seasons of American Horror Story and All’s Fair among them — and the question of why she keeps returning to his world gets a thoughtful answer.
“Ryan is such a master at reframing what we know about events and pop culture and coming away with a different understanding and perspective on ourselves and on each other,” she says. “He’s got his finger on the pulse in a way that he really knows what people want to see.” She also credits him for something more personal. “I owe so much to him. I’m so grateful for him giving me these roles and giving women over 30, over 40 — Naomi, Sarah, all these women — these dynamic, wonderful roles that are interesting. Not a lot of people do that.”
Murphy, for the record, still makes her audition.
“Maybe next time he won’t,” she says, laughing. “We’ll see.”
Love Story is available to stream on Hulu and Disney+.
