Exclusive Interview
‘Love Story’: Inside the JFK Jr. & Carolyn Wedding Scene That Left Everyone in Tears
What To Know
- The March 5 episode of Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette recreates the couple’s ultra-private 1996 wedding on Cumberland Island.
- Constance Zimmer has a standout moment as Ann, Carolyn’s mother.
- Executive producer Brad Simpson and Zimmer opened up about bringing JFK Jr. and Carolyn’s wedding weekend to life.
John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette took the next step in their relationship with their ultra-private wedding on an island in Georgia during the March 5 episode of Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette. The couple married on September 21, 1996, and the photo of them walking out of the tiny church as husband and wife remains one of the most iconic photos of the pair. (Warning: Spoilers ahead!)
The episode takes viewers inside the lead-up to the big day and what happened on Cumberland Island. At the rehearsal dinner, Carolyn’s mother, Ann (Constance Zimmer), gives a speech to their closest family and friends. Zimmer delivers a powerful, poignant performance in which Ann speaks directly to John in front of everyone about wanting him to always protect her daughter. Executive producer Brad Simpson and Zimmer spoke with Swooon about Episode 6’s big wedding and the weekend’s most emotional moment.
“We knew enough about the speech [and] that it was a little bit of a record scratch at the wedding because she wasn’t totally on board,” Simpson began. The wedding episode wasn’t actually filmed on Cumberland Island but in upstate New York. Simpson noted that “all the actors knew each other” by the time this episode was in production.
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“They were pretty bonded, and it felt like we were at a wedding. We were in a distant location, so everybody was staying in a hotel together, and they were getting bused up and bused around together, all in their fancy clothes, up to the church, and the wedding reception felt like a wedding reception. It was very intimate, but it was extras and then all our key actors were there, being incredibly supportive of each other.”
Simpson went on to praise Zimmer’s performance. “She came in, it was the end of a long night, going deep, deep into the morning,” he said. “Grace Gummer was very sick. We were trying to get her out, and everybody was being incredibly emotive and supportive and Constance stood up and gave that speech, and people sobbed all around. The extras, they sobbed. It was so magnificent. And she hit it again and again. And when you look around and see the reactions to both her speech and to everything, it is the real reactions of our actors because they did feel so bonded and felt like they were at something very emotional.”
Zimmer acknowledged how monumental of a moment this was for her character. “It was a four-page monologue, and everybody was there, and every single person… I took it all in because it’s a big moment,” she said at the Love Story premiere.
In recreating JFK Jr. and Carolyn’s wedding weekend, the Love Story team built a church in upstate New York. “When you walked into that church, you felt like you were in a building that had been there for hundreds and hundreds of years with the whole thing by candlelight. I think we could do a side-by-side of our wedding and their wedding. We wanted to match completely, and it did,” he said.
Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette, Thursdays, 9/8c, FX
