Ryan Murphy’s John & Carolyn

If you’ve been visiting this site since our early days, you know that I’ve long been obsessed with John F Kennedy Jr and Carolyn Bessette. Last fall I posted about the news that Ryan Murphy would be giving us his take on the most iconic It Couple of the 90s but it’s been quiet ever since… until a few days ago, when Ryan shared footage on Instagram of the two actors who’ve been cast as John and Carolyn, Paul Kelly and Sarah Pidgeon.

Seeing this, I’m not entirely sold but I am more sold on Paul as John than I am on Sarah as Carolyn. This shot of Paul with the cap turned backwards is… very good. 

The hair is there, it’s a good face, I can see it, but I’m not sure of course beyond appearance if Paul Kelly can capture JFK Jr’s specific charisma. It’s the charm and the easy but not offensive entitlement of someone who was born royal in a republic, before the term “nepo baby” became a thing, and yet also the rare kind of nepo baby who you can’t complain about when you see him walk into a room and change the molecules. How can you deny that kind of legacy gene? 

With Sarah as Carolyn, however, it’s a different story. And on a meta level, a much more unfair story. In real life, John was born and bred to walk into any room and command the attention. Carolyn didn’t know that life, she was unprepared for it, she was deeply uncomfortable with it. And as the woman who finally won the heart of the most eligible bachelor in the world, she also had to meet an impossible set of expectations, and jealousy, and scrutiny and misogyny. 

As the actor who’s playing that woman, it’ll be tougher for Sarah too, I get that. Because I’m here, right here, doing the nitpicking. The hair isn’t working, that shade of blonde. The body language doesn’t feel right to me, the way she’s posing, as an influencer/model because Carolyn was too cool to pose like that. I can’t get past the face either. Not that Sarah isn’t attractive, of course she is, but not the way Carolyn was. 

Sarah, to me, looks like she could have played Cressida Cowper in Bridgerton, a girl who was born indulged and privileged and who was groomed to be on the arm of a man with a large household to manage and rule over. 

Not that that’s a bad thing – we love Cressida! It’s just that Cressida isn’t Carolyn. And unfortunately for Sarah Pidgeon, this is what she’ll be dealing with not only during production but when the show finally airs next year. 

So that was based on the screen tests that Ryan Murphy’s team shared the other day to stir anticipation for the project. Today we have new pap shots of Sarah shooting on location in NYC, running from the paps as Carolyn often had to. 

I like these more. The converse and the silk skirt, the leather blazer, it’s definitely giving Calvin Klein of the era. What’s still missing, and of course it’s hard to judge just from these photos so let’s hope that they’ll bring more of it when we see the final product, is Carolyn’s athletic sometimes even tomboy energy. There was a femininity to her, definitely, but it wasn’t delicate, she wasn’t uber-girly. And Sarah’s physicality here reads rather feminine. There’s also the intangible aspects of Carolyn’s physicality. We know now that she was struggling under all the pressure and the speculation and the intense attention. But on the outside, at the time, she also appeared aloof. That was part of her magic and mystery, her expressions were often so inscrutable, it only added to the fascination. 

This is what the show will have to capture where Carolyn is concerned. Yes, naturally, we’ll see more of her interiority – as interpreted through Ryan Murphy’s lens and how he perceives her – and therefore her vulnerability; but the challenge is to balance and manage and perhaps counter how the public felt about her then and even more so now as she’s basically become an icon in death, further cementing the image we all have of her, no matter how far it is from the truth of her as a person. 

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