After 13 years of hearing “no,” Paul Anthony Kelly was ready to walk away.
“I was really toying with the idea of giving up and maybe moving back to Canada and raising a family and doing something totally different,” the actor tells Gold Derby. “I was about to give up.”
Instead, everything changed — fast. Just three weeks before filming began on FX’s Love Story, Kelly landed the role of John F. Kennedy Jr., stepping into one of the most recognizable figures in contemporary American history. There was no long runway, no months of preparation — just a crash course and a leap of faith.
“When something like that happens, I was so blessed to have Ryan Murphy and his team,” Kelly says. “They kind of took all the outside thinking away and just allowed me to focus completely.”
He was quickly set up with a dialect coach, an acting coach, and a physical trainer — the latter helping him bulk up to match JFK Jr.’s famously athletic frame. “I was in good shape, but I needed to put on a little bit more,” he says. “Because of that and the time constraint before we started, I just locked in and that’s all I knew. It was the most incredible experience.”
Kelly believes the timing made all the difference. “Hitting this at age 37 was great in terms of maturity,” he says. “I was more secure in myself to take on this type of role and the pressures that come with that — the success of everything. If I was a little younger when this happened, I probably would’ve navigated it differently.”
There were clues along the way. Long before he booked the role, Kelly had been told he bore a resemblance to JFK Jr., particularly during his earlier career as a model. “The comments were always, ‘You look like a young JFK Jr.,’” he recalls. “And I was like, ‘OK, sure.’ And here we are today.”
But resemblance only gets you so far — especially with a three-week prep window. Kelly leaned heavily on archival footage and an audiobook narrated by JFK Jr. himself — his reading of his father’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Profiles in Courage, which profiles acts of political bravery. “That was a great asset just to get into his cadence and rhythm and his kind of lackadaisical speech patterns,” he says. “He really spoke kind of in the middle of his tongue, whereas I’m Canadian and we’re tip-of-the-tongue talkers.” He also dove into interviews, TV clips, and books. “I really just became a sponge,” he says.
The physical transformation came with its own challenge. Kelly is heavily tattooed. JFK Jr. was not. “It added an extra two to two-and-a-half hours if they had to do full body,” he says. For shirtless scenes and running sequences, that meant daily airbrushing sessions. He used the time to prepare — headphones in, focusing on his breath, and listening to JFK Jr.’s voice. “I would do a bunch of Wim Hof breathing,” he reveals.
At the heart of Love Story is the relationship between JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, and for that, everything hinged on Kelly’s chemistry with Sarah Pidgeon. From the start, it clicked. “The day that we had our chemistry test, there was just something palpable,” he says. “We saw each other, knew the assignment, and just felt this unspoken and overwhelming trust.” That connection deepened quickly off-camera. “We had this private moment where we could say, ‘Who are you? What’s your life like?’” he says. Once filming began, “it was off to the races.”
While the romance is central, some of the most challenging moments weren’t the explosive arguments, but the quiet ones. “It’s easy to say things,” Kelly explains. “But to keep that kind of bottled up hurts a little bit more. Silence speaks volumes.” Even the louder scenes had their quirks — including an early argument where he’s mid-meal. “Yelling at your mom with a mouthful of food is difficult,” he says, “but so fun.”
The ensemble around him only added to the experience, from Naomi Watts as his mother, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, to Grace Gummer as his sister, Caroline. “I never in my wildest dreams thought that I would be here,” Kelly says. Asked who he’d give an Emmy, he points to Gummer. “She’s such a star… she has this emotional depth to her that is — it hurts.” Their dynamic came naturally. “I truly feel like she’s a sister I never had.”
Even on the hardest days, the perspective never left him. “Honestly, every day on set was so fun, just in the sheer fact that I’m living my dream,” he says. The first day, especially, stands out. “It just became real,” he says. “‘Oh, here we go.’ This was all my hard work… it became this real adventure I was on.”
His advice to anyone still chasing that first yes? “Keep on waiting. Keep on trying,” he says. “If you’ve already been in it for 13 years… what’s another 13? All it takes is one.”
