Bringing the Kennedy family — America’s closest thing to royalty — to screen was bound to spark strong reactions. When Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette first-look images of Paul Anthony Kelly as John F. Kennedy Jr. and Sarah Pidgeon as Carolyn Bessette Kennedy (“CBK”) were first shared (and since-deleted) from the Ryan Murphy Productions Instagram account last June, the response was immediate — and critical.

From Carolyn’s former hair colorist to fashion stylists online, observers zeroed in on Pidgeon’s shade of blonde hair and wardrobe, questioning the show’s take on the ’90s minimalist style icon. Paparazzi disruptions during filming only amplified the scrutiny. Executive producer Brad Simpson says the frenzy felt familiar. “It mirrored the journey Carolyn Bessette went through, from being unknown to suddenly being criticized for her every move,” he tells The Hollywood Reporter.

Rather than rattle the team, the backlash became an early course correction. “I wasn’t worried — I was thrilled people cared,” says series creator Connor Hines.

Inspired by Elizabeth Beller’s biography, Love Story traces the couple’s romance and the tragedy that followed. John, Carolyn and Carolyn’s sister, Lauren Bessette, died in a 1999 plane crash near Martha’s Vineyard — a loss the series also seeks to honor.

Not everyone has embraced it: Jack Schlossberg — JFK’s grandson and JFK Jr.’s nephew — previously criticized the show for “profiting off” his uncle’s life in a “grotesque way.” The Love Story team has defended the integrity of their work, and Pidgeon tells THR she hopes the Kennedy family will watch so “they feel that we led with respect and honor for John and Carolyn.”

Below, the cast and creative team speak with THR about casting John and Carolyn and Naomi Watts as Jackie Kennedy Onassis, navigating early criticism and responding to Schlossberg’s comments.

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Talk to me about the casting process for JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, and why these actors felt right for such iconic roles, especially since they’re relatively unknown actors, with this being Paul’s first major on-screen role.

​CONNOR HINES (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER/CREATOR) Going into the process, we were quite convinced that Carolyn would be much more difficult to cast. Then Sarah Pidgeon, quite quickly, emerged as the frontrunner. I still remember watching her first tape, seeing her on screen — just the way she holds the screen and her presence. It’s a combination of a guardedness with accessibility; there’s a talent and an intelligence. She ran away with it as soon as we started watching her.

Obviously, John was a much more laborious process. We saw over 1,000 people. It came down to me chasing people on the street who looked remotely like him to see if they wanted to tape. 

NINA JACOBSON (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) They often ran away! (Laughs.)

​HINES I said, “I promise, I’m actually a writer!” And then it was Ryan who had encouraged us to go back through all the tapes. But I think it was for John. In addition to trying to find somebody who was People magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive, John had an aesthetic that a lot of leading men don’t really have anymore. It’s a little bit more of a bygone masculinity. It was that, combined with somebody who could be plausibly sitting with the Kennedys, who could have attended Brown [University], launched a magazine, and on top of that, has their own inherent star quality. Those are a lot of prerequisites for an actor (laughs), but when Paul walked into the room, especially when he started reading with Sarah, everybody knew almost instantly that he is what we were looking for.

​JACOBSON Also, just to get a guy with hair on his chest, who looks great with his shirt off, but not in a ripped gym bunny way. It’s a type of man that was way, way harder to find — and that you could also attach to him all of the hopes and aspirations that we traditionally attach to handsome young Kennedys.

​HINES We said we were looking for a George Clooney type who could seemingly run for president. So not a high bar at all. (Laughs.) 

Did he beat out any well-known, notable actors in the industry for the role?

​BRAD SIMPSON (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) We didn’t go to any [notable actors.] From the beginning, Ryan really wanted A Star Is Born — two unknowns. I remember him saying to me, “I want to have a billboard on the Sunset Strip that looks like a Herb Ritts photograph that is two beautiful people you have no pre-existing association with.” Sarah does have Stereophonic and I Know What You Did Last Summer, but he didn’t want to bring the baggage of what that was. So we were on a real star search from the beginning and I think that worked to our favor because it’s not, “Look at how X actors transform themselves.” You’re going to meet these people for the first time as JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette.

We’ve seen many interpretations of Jackie Kennedy Onassis before, so what was it about Naomi Watts that really sold it for you? 

HINES She’s remarkable. When I would watch her, I would completely forget that I wrote the show and that I was there to work. She was so mesmerizing in her performance. I felt like I was at a play every day she was on set. She embodied her with such a dynamic, funny, witty nature, and also so much pathos, seeing Jackie at that point in her life as a protective mother helping her kids move through the world. And fortunately, Naomi has collaborated with Ryan several times over. So when we were thinking about who is as iconic and as powerful a force as Jackie Kennedy, who better than Naomi Watts? We were very lucky that she agreed to do this. And the voice was exceptional.

How did you approach balancing the tragedy with the love story, and deciding how much of the plane crash to portray?

HINES What I found most appealing about them was the courtship and marriage. The tragedy only cemented their fame — what pulled me into this was the love story. Obviously, their lives were cut short. But I was almost exclusively drawn to the dynamics of the marriage more than anything else, and to handle what everybody knows inevitably does happen with as much grace and sensitivity as possible. But this is a story about when they were with us, and what they navigated together more than anything.

What went into the decision to start the series on the day they passed?

HINES We wanted to contrast the Carolyn everybody knows from images with that very bleached blonde hair; very straight aesthetic. It’s very recognizable. We cut back in time to show who Carolyn was before everybody got to meet her. Somebody who had a different sense of style and more bohemian hair. There was a whole person before the world got to know her who was living in a studio apartment in the East Village, throwing clothes on and running off to work. To see where she was towards the end of her life, and then cut back to the beginning of a woman just moving through New York like everybody else anonymously was really important and effective for telling the rest of the story.

Because the show is a love story, it relies so much on the connection between Paul and Sarah. Was their chemistry apparent from the start?

HINES Yes, before they even started doing the scenes together. They just looked at each other and the whole room was like, “This is what we’ve been waiting for.” It’s not really something you can calculate or look for. It just has to happen in the room. And it was instantaneous. I think they both knew it too in that moment, which made it that much better.

During filming, there was a lot of online criticism of the wardrobe, hair and overall look based on paparazzi photos. How much attention did you pay to that reaction, and did it influence or change any creative decisions the show later made?

​SIMPSON Usually on the show, you’re in your bubble for six to nine months working out the kinks, trying to pull it together, and people only look at the finished product. We found ourselves in a situation where, in New York City, it’s the summer, it is hot, people are out there with their cell phones and Ryan [Murphy] had released some very early test images that weren’t final. And we got feedback — we got intense feedback. What it showed us was how deeply people cared about Carolyn Bessette and how much she meant to generations. But it was a good flex point for us to adjust. We made some more dramatic changes. We brought in Rudy Mance, the brilliant costume designer who sourced a lot of original pieces that CBK wore. We went to the actual collectors, to people who’d written books about her fashion and style and we formed a brain trust. We went from using a wig to using Sarah’s real hair and figuring out how to create the different buttery versions.

One of the things we were facing is that we’re chronicling Carolyn Bessette over seven years, and she’s mostly photographed in those last few years of her life. Her aesthetic, while it had a consistent Lo-fi luxury quality, did change over that period. Some of the critique was also of her wearing stuff that a young woman could afford when she was just 25 and working at Calvin Klein. But we took all that feedback in, and I think we got it right. I really am proud of how it looks. I think she looks beautiful.

It was really hard on our actors, though, because they were in a situation where we were being stalked by paparazzi, just like Carolyn was. We had 17 paparazzi out in front of us. When you see a scene of their first date in the first episode, you should know that seven feet away there are photographers outside of our barrier, snapping pictures like crazy. It was a lot for her to go through, and, weirdly, it mirrored the journey Carolyn Bessette went through, from being unknown to suddenly being criticized for her every move.

HINES Oftentimes we would be filming on the street or in Central Park, and we would no longer be able to tell who we had hired to play a paparazzo and who had shown up to take photos of them. I would have imagined that all of the interest we were going to be able to gauge about the show was going to be when the show was released. So for us to know right off the bat how much people were still invested in them was incredibly telling in terms of the audience we could hopefully anticipate. I knew the criticisms were all things that could be very much course-corrected as we were setting the tone and the aesthetic of the show. So I wasn’t worried about that, but I was honestly thrilled that people cared as much as they did.

What did you make of the criticism? And why do you think it was so harsh?

SARAH PIDGEON (CAROLYN BESSETTE) When I decided to audition for this role, I was aware that Carolyn and John are very beloved. There’s a sense of protection around them. In playing her, I feel the same way. There was certainly an opportunity to recognize the parallels when paparazzi would show up on set and understand that there was an interest in what we were doing, as well as in John and Carolyn trying to walk their dog, which is very different from us trying to make a TV show. But I think it goes to show how beloved they are.

Some of the clothes I get to wear are so incredible, and they’re not necessarily the same pieces she herself wore, but they are from the same collection. Not even replicas. They were from the ’90s — and the costuming doesn’t get better. I don’t know how you costume better than that. It was interesting to find her younger costuming and hair, because it was at a time when she wasn’t heavily photographed. As a young woman, there is not a lot of photography available of her at that time. That was such an interesting conversation to have with Rudy our costumer, who was incredible, and figuring out what clothing Carolyn was wearing before she was heavily photographed.

​PAUL ANTHONY KELLY (JOHN F. KENNEDY JR.) There were a lot of parallels I could draw from what they dealt with in their day-to-day life. I mean, it’s totally different. Of course, we’re doing a television show, and, as [Sarah] said, people were enamored with them just walking their dog. They couldn’t get a moment’s rest. But it added a layer of reality to our given existence in this. It really showed how much people care about these two individuals and how beloved they are, and it made us work a little bit harder toward the end goal, which is just to tell this beautiful love story. 

I know the series is inspired by a book, but did you also speak with any members of the Kennedy family during this process?

PIDGEON I did not. 

ANTHONY KELLY Nor did I.

JACOBSON We have done a lot of stories rooted in real events, many times where the people are still alive, or relatives of the people are still alive. Generally speaking, we don’t engage with the people who are public figures, because you end up either feeling obligated to honor something that they ask you, “Please portray me this way, but not that way,” or you feel that, that you’re having competing versions. When you take more of a research posture as opposed to a personal interview position, we have found that you get a more dimensional view, even though you are missing the chance to talk to the people themselves. You’re getting more multiplicities of views.

The only time we really did work with the person was very specific. It was with Monica Lewinsky, because she had been muzzled herself all during the time that her story unfolded. She never got to tell her version of events, like was forbidden from telling it. There was no way that we could do the Impeachment: [American Crime] Story without including her, but she would be the first to tell you, it’s also very, very difficult to task people and accept the idea that people are going to have to turn your story into material that works for television or film, and most people find it very hard. So we did not talk to any of the principals at all on this one, but we did do very extensive research — high, low and everywhere in between.

Jack Schlossberg was very vocal on social media, calling the show, “a grotesque way to profit off of his uncle’s life.” How did you navigate that criticism, and do you have a response to his concerns? 

SIMPSON I understand that this show that we made with sincerity about these people is also the story of a tragedy in some people’s lives. And for all of us who are making TV shows based on real events, you have to consider your ethical obligation to the family members and approach it with love and kindness. What I hope is that when people watch the show, they will see our sincerity. They will see that we’ve approached this with love, and that we were trying to celebrate the life of Carolyn Bessette and JFK Jr.. Like all of us, they were flawed people and they were complicated; people who had the press chronicling their every move, and we show what it was like to be in the middle of that. But I think that when people watch the show, they’ll see the sincerity we brought just the same way we did to The People v. O. J. Simpson or The Assassination of Gianni Versace. We want to feel what it was like for people to walk through their footsteps. I can understand why somebody could have a reaction before they see it, but I would say, “watch the show,” because I think they’re going to be surprised at how sincere it is.

PIDGEON I don’t know what it’s like to have a TV show or a book or movie written about my family, and I understand the sensitivities. He has every right to share how he feels about it. We were approaching this with integrity and respect, and I think we were successful in that, but we were also understanding that these weren’t just real people — but they also have family and friends still with us today, and that their legacy reverberates and lives on through them as well. That was always part of my consciousness. I hope that if they do watch it, they feel that we led with respect and honor for John and Carolyn — that’s my hope.

Something I appreciated about this series was how it included Lauren Bessette, because I think the public can tend to overlook that she died as well, since JFK Jr. and Carolyn are such famous figures. Was that important to you from the jump, to make sure she was honored?

​HINES Absolutely. As somebody with three sisters who are my very best friends, I know how critical that relationship is. I knew from the very get-go that that was something we all wanted to honor, and yes, it was absolutely intentional. I think the relationship that Sydney [Lemmon] and Sarah have is one of the more compelling parts of the series, and I really can’t wait for people to see that.

​SIMPSON We want to remind people that Carolyn’s mom lost two daughters that day. 

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Love Story premieres on Feb. 12 at 6 p.m. PT/9 p.m. ET on FX/Hulu with three episodes, and internationally on Disney+. Following the launch, one new episode of the nine-episode series will air weekly on Thursdays.