Caroline Kennedy got a good laugh out of Grace Gummer’s portrayal of her younger self in Ryan Murphy’s “Love Story:,” Kennedy’s son, Jack Schlossberg, said on Wednesday.
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Speaking to Katie Couric on her podcast “Next Question with Katie Couric,” Schlossberg recalled showing Kennedy clips of Gummer’s performance in the show, although neither watched all nine episodes of the FX miniseries.
“Love Story” followed the lives, marriage and death of Kennedy’s brother, John F. Kennedy Jr., and his wife, Carolyn Bessette. Its finale aired on March 26.
Couric’s interview with Schlossberg focused mainly on his own political prospects as he runs for the U.S. House of Representatives in New York, but she asked the potential congressman his thoughts on the show because he has been outspoken about it since it began airing in February.
“My issue is with, you know, we have a lot of serious problems facing our country and my family. We’re not just celebrities. We’re not just icons. These are public servants,” Schlossberg explained.
He continued: “They’re public servants who were duly elected. And my uncle John did a lot to try to advance, you know, the causes of progress in his time, civil rights.”
Schlossberg described his uncle as “a very serious person,” who also worked for the District Attorney’s office. The show worked to “fictionalize and to sensationalize his romantic life without giving any credence to serious things that he did,” Schlossberg said.
Despite that, he and his mom were “laughing so hard,” at a clip of Gummer portraying Kennedy, Schlossberg said.
In the clip, “the person’s freaking out and we’re just laughing so hard, as if that’s how my mom acts,” he said.
Couric noted that his parents — Kennedy and Ed Schlossberg — were not portrayed particularly positively in the show.
Schlossberg, in response, called his mother and father “the two nicest, most dignified, private people in the whole world who do nothing but help others.”
Schlossberg made it clear that he took no issue with those who liked and enjoyed the TV show, but cautioned them to remember that “it might be entertaining, but it’s fiction.”
“I’m really proud of the person and family that I come from, because our family’s legacy is of public servants and standing up for people who have been marginalized, and using politics to try to inspire people to believe in their country and to fight for what they believe in,” he said.
Schlossberg isn’t the first person connected to John F. Kennedy Jr. to speak out against the show.
Actress Daryl Hannah, who dated JFK Jr. before he met Bessette, penned an essay in the New York Times accusing “Love Story” of portraying her as “irritating, self-absorbed, whiny and inappropriate.”
Hannah said in the essay that the version of her in the show isn’t “even a remotely accurate representation of my life, my conduct or my relationship with John.”
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