Before Sarah Pidgeon ever stepped in front of a camera as Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, she had to reckon with something that sets this role apart from almost any other biographical performance: her subject was famously private. No memoir. No carefully managed public image. Just photographs, a myth, and a “mood board” — and to the many people who still feel fiercely protective of her memory, she is very much not yours to interpret.
“People are very protective of her,” Pidgeon tells Gold Derby. “I certainly feel that way. It was quite daunting to take on a character so well known and so protected. But I think that just furthered the intensity of my commitment to really hone in on what I believed made her who she was.”
That commitment — and the performance that came out of it — is why Pidgeon is among the top Emmy contenders this season for Best Movie/Limited Series Actress. Love Story, Ryan Murphy‘s FX limited series, became the most-watched in the network’s history on Hulu, and Pidgeon’s work at the center of it has been the conversation all season. At the Gotham Awards, Pidgeon was nominated for Best Lead Performance in a Limited or Anthology Series, and the cast was honored with a special Ensemble Tribute. “This show is really a sum of all its parts,” she says. “It’s a love story, but a love story in New York — so a Gotham Award felt very fitting.”
Pidgeon had just two days to prepare before sending in her self-tape audition, and then about three weeks before going in for her screen test. “I was taking in as much information as I could,” she recalls. That information was scarce — Carolyn left almost no public record of her inner life.
“I knew her image very well,” Pidgeon says. “I knew she worked at Calvin Klein, I knew she was married to John. But the person that she was — I was not familiar with.” What drew her in was the show’s logline: to peel back the curtain on the interior lives of two people the world thought it knew from two-dimensional images. The audition sides showed her someone who was “guarded, but very sensitive. Funny. Incredibly intelligent.” And then she got the call. “Once you get the role,” she says, “you have that ‘oh crap’ moment. It’s not just this freedom and inspiration of auditioning anymore — now you have to deliver.”
From there, Pidgeon threw herself into preparation. She worked with a movement coach, trying to locate Carolyn’s physical essence — not through prosthetics or surface mimicry, but from the inside out. “We imagined her as a grassy, mossy green ball rolling down the streets of New York at 26 years old,” she says. “How can I change my physical form and put my attention someplace that feels evocative of this very enigmatic woman?” The task she set herself was to trace the arc of a life: how does someone who moves through the world with complete freedom in 1993 become one of the most photographed women in America by 1999?
There was just one problem: she still didn’t have a John F. Kennedy Jr. Pidgeon was cast at the very end of February in 2024, and by late April her team was still fielding the same question — have they found the guy yet? “It proved very difficult,” she says. When Paul Anthony Kelly finally came through the door, something clicked immediately. “I think this might be the guy,” she remembers thinking. Kelly, who recently told Gold Derby that he landed the role just weeks before filming began, described the chemistry test as having “something palpable” — “this unspoken and overwhelming trust.” Pidgeon’s read on how that chemistry works: “I just don’t know how you build it. I feel like you sort of either have it or you don’t — it’s a transference of energy.” What helped, she says, is that the show’s structure allowed them to discover each other the same way their characters did. “We were getting to know each other as they were.”
“To play Carolyn, I really needed to have the shared amount of self-possession that she did in order to advocate for the person that I came to know her to be,” Pidgeon says. “I’m 29, but I feel like I’ve sort of been cosplaying my adult self for a while now, and I’m sort of coming into this new phase of myself.”
The ensemble around her made the work easier. Pidgeon singled out Alessandro Nivola, who plays Calvin Klein, as a particular joy. “I loved working with Alessandro,” she says. “It felt like a lot of play.” Nivola, speaking to Gold Derby earlier, returned the warmth: “She’s just totally free and spontaneous and not at all actory,” he said. “We got along right away. The scenes were so free.”
The production was shot largely out of order, but nothing quite prepared Pidgeon for Episode 8 — shot in just six days, with full page rewrites arriving the morning of filming. She describes it as one of the most thrilling experiences of the entire shoot. The long takes — 17-page scenes that unfolded across the apartment like a stage play — felt like a gift. “John walks in the door, and then the conversation begins, and it goes everywhere,” she says. “I imagined it like a river — you get down the river differently every single time, but it’s still the river.” The apartment itself, she says, became a third character. Director Jesse Peretz opened the episode with a series of tableaux — Carolyn smoking, lying around the house, still and interior — that Pidgeon found deeply affecting. “So much emotion was projected through those images,” she says. “I loved those days.”
Love Story has grown into one of the year’s most memorable hits, and through all of it Pidgeon keeps coming back to the same thing: the woman behind the image. “She’s known on Instagram and ‘mood boards’ because she was, of course, so fashionable,” she says. “But she was so much more than that. The last thing she would want to be known for are her clothes.”
Love Story is streaming on Hulu and Disney+.
