The creators of “Love Story” struggled to find a modern actor who could portray the ‘80s-era masculinity of JFK Jr., to the point they nearly had to shut down production.
The FX limited series “Love Story” dramatizes the 1990s romance between John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette before their deaths in 1999. The show has also faced its fair share of controversies since its release. But even before it officially premiered, the show had a major hurdle to overcome as its creators encountered America’s modern crisis of masculinity.
Executive producer Brad Simpson spoke about this directly to People magazine last month, in an interview that resurfaced thanks to the conservative women’s news outlet Evie Magazine.
“JFK [Jr.] was hard,” Simpson said. “We were three weeks away from shooting and we still [had] not cast him. We’d seen every male actor between the age of 25 and 38. [Creator] Connor [Hines] was coming in every day with models he’d found on Instagram, sending cold emails.”
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Fellow executive producer Connor Hines told the same news outlet that he was desperate to find a good fit for the role, to the point he was “approaching people on the street, at the gym, ‘Would you like to read for John? Please. We need him.'”
While the series has become a cultural phenomenon, Simpson recalled that the struggle to cast the role brought the show to the very brink, saying, “We were about to shut down production and pause because we couldn’t find him.”
Actor Paul Anthony Kelly is somewhat of a newcomer to mainstream fame, but was seen as a perfect choice because he not only looks like JFK Jr. did, but also has one other rare quality that even seasoned Hollywood creators struggled to find in the acting world.
The magazine summarized, “It wasn’t an issue of not liking the actors who were in the running, Simpson says, but there was simply something missing with all of them until they saw Kelly.”
“Part of it was just that sort of ’80s, old school masculinity — a man with hair on his chest, sort of Richard Gere, Tom Selleck, the classic chiseled looks — we’re not making those guys anymore, for some reason, and he really needed to have that,” Simpson said.
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Kelly was among a final group of potential choices who were called in to read from the script in person, as was done in the past in what the creators called an “old-fashioned screen test.”
“I remember at the screen test, one of the hair and makeup people passed by me, and was like, ‘You’re crazy if you don’t cast him,'” Simpson said of Kelly’s audition. “It was just clear that he was JFK.”
