Paul Anthony Kelly On Becoming JFK Jr

The Canadian actor set about filling the legendary rollerblades of John F Kennedy Jr in Ryan Murphy’s Love Story. As his career gathers speed, he sits down with Man About Town to trace how it all fell into place.

“I’m a liability. It’s amazing I can walk,” Paul Anthony Kelly laughs. “You’ve got some bike riding, and I think that’s as far as insurance goes.” We are talking rollerblades – or rather, the lack of them.

Ryan Murphy’s latest venture, Love Story: John F Kennedy Jr & Carolyn Bessett, is, when I sit down with Kelly, the show on everyone’s lips. The 37-year-old Canadian actor and his co-lead, Sarah Pidgeon, step into the iconic shoes of one of America’s most beloved and scrutinised couples. There’s a sea of backwards newsboy caps, slouchy tailoring, Sade soundtracking and a tale of attraction that proves more irresistible by the episode. However, for romantics around the world and sharp-eyed critics alike, one detail feels conspicuously absent: where are John-John’s rollerblades? “I think a lot of people were excited about [seeing] that,” he says, indulging my fixation. “We never really got into it. [But] there’s a video of me rollerblading somewhere recently.” Call it investigative journalism – suddenly, the research has a lead.

Considering the lengthy press run he’s been swept into this spring, you may already know that Kelly is disarmingly handsome. What proves more interesting, though, is the speed of his wit, his charm deployed in spades. An expected trait, perhaps, for someone plucked from relative obscurity to embody one of America’s most magnetic figures – the man who gave meaning to rizz long before it entered the cultural lexicon. Still, it’s not something to take for granted. Hollywood has never been short on men with blade-sharp jawlines and broad shoulders. Charisma, however, remains a rarer commodity.

You just can’t deny it: he has the Kennedy factor – deeply human and humble, buffered by an almost preternatural nonchalance, and finished with a hint of James Dean in the hairline. So, to say we’re speaking at a pivotal moment in his life feels like an understatement. He’s dialling in from Los Angeles on the Friday before Oscars weekend, fresh off a flight from Paris, where he’s just inaugurated his new role as a front-row fixture during fashion week. It’s a neat POV shift, considering the nearly two decades of modelling behind him. Having walked for Vivienne Westwood and fronted campaigns for American giant Banana Republic, the career sustained him while he waited for the right role to land. “I like to sit down much more than I like to walk,” he says. “[Modelling] was great to me, but I felt like I just wasn’t progressing in the way that I wanted to. I was at my ceiling there, and I was happy with it. It kept the lights on, and we could live. But the position I’m in now is just so much more gratifying and fulfilling.”

Jet lag might be the expected side effect of becoming the man of the hour, but the idea of a full night’s sleep has long since exited Kelly’s vocabulary. Shortly before audiences embraced him on screen as their new leading man, he stepped into another life-defining role, diving headfirst into fatherhood with the arrival of his first child with wife, Syd Widziszewski-Kelly, this January. “It’s been almost a year of no sleep, but it’s the absolute best thing in the world.” His skin doesn’t wear his sleep deficit, at least. So much so, I have to fight the urge to ask for regime tips. “There’s plenty of time to sleep after all this,” he continues.

Paul wears SAINT LAURENT

The level of exposure that comes with leading a show of this scale would make anyone feel like a small fish in Hollywood’s vast, ever-watchful pond. To face it without a string of major screen credits to anchor your IMDb page only heightens the sense of acceleration. It’s a story the industry knows well: a fresh-faced, good-looking, hungry actor propelled into stardom overnight, left to find his balance in a reality suddenly dense with flashbulbs and press lines. Not everyone is a Kennedy, after all. Not everyone grows up fluent in the language of scrutiny. A parallel Canadian trajectory has unravelled just weeks ahead of Kelly’s – that of Heated Rivalry’s Hudson Williams. As heartthrob Shane Hollander in the hockey drama phenomenon, the 25-year-old and co-star Connor Storrie instantaneously became the industry’s most sought-after faces.

“I mean, those guys, kudos to them. They are definitely on the world stage. They’re inescapable,” Kelly says. I resist the urge to point out that, by this point, so is he. “Didn’t they run the torch for the Olympics? That’s wild. I’m kind of watching them to see how they’re handling everything, and taking little notes.”

Growing up in Port McNicoll, a village of barely a thousand people on Ontario’s Georgian Bay – “a beautiful, gorgeous area, but not much to do” – he remembers sensing, early on, that life might stretch beyond his community’s edges. He found an outlet for that restless, fruitful energy in his high school drama programme. “I could just go and play around,” he recalls. “There weren’t any real academic demands. Just creative imagination, and I’ve got that.”

A move to Toronto at 17, the province’s capital, followed as a natural next step. He lived with a band (“I didn’t play in it, but they’re dear friends of mine”) and threw himself into what he calls “that soul-searching, self-finding thing. They kind of took me in and let me just explore myself and figure out what was up.” Then came modelling. He was scouted, and the years that followed unfolded in transit – stints in Asia, London, Italy – before eventually landing in the United States, where he now calls home. After 13 years split between New York and Los Angeles, he’s settled with his family in the Pacific Northwest, a quiet counterpoint to the gloss and velocity of his present-day working life. “Where we live is the closest I’ve ever felt to the place I grew up,” he says. “It’s different, but the sense of community and the cleanliness of the air, it’s just calm. It feels safe. It feels like home.” Once the press tour winds down, you’ll likely find him in the nearby mountains snowboarding (proficiency level: “avid”), skiing (proficiency level: “enthusiastic dabbler”), carving out moments of much-needed decompression. For now, though, he remains suited up in the persona of one of his generation’s most mythologised figures.

A small army of men tried on John-John’s many hats – one imagines Ryan Murphy’s audition room resembling Washington Square Park, a few weeks ahead of our chat, when a JFK Jr lookalike contest drew a crowd of eerily convincing contenders following Love Story and Kelly’s captivation. “They’d seen over 1,000 guys, I’m told,” he says. To get it, knowing those numbers… I guess all it really takes is one [role]. This was my one, and here we are.”

Paul wears BRUNELLO CUCINELLI

He received the audition invite over email in February last year and was asked to tape two scenes. One was the dinner sequence from Episode 1, where John features alongside Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Caroline Kennedy and Edwin Schlossberg. “There’s a bit of a tiff. I was like, ‘Okay, that’s cool. Fun. Just eat steak and yell at my mum a little bit,’” he laughs. And the other, naturally, was the now-iconic first date with Carolyn set in an East Village Indian restaurant. “And that Indian restaurant in New York now has a line down the block. Good for them. I want to see if I can get a free meal next time I’m in New York. Just some free naan would be cool.” A fairly safe bet, Paul.

“[The script] was so well written. I did the tape, sent it off, and went about my business. I’ve got a history of no’s, or just not hearing anything, so you do it and hope for the best,” he recalls. “They circled back a couple of months later. They still hadn’t found their JFK Jr, and asked for another tape, which turned into a producer session callback. I felt like I did well there and got a call the next day. Then it moved to a chemistry read with Sarah. We had chemistry straight away – instant camaraderie. And then I did a screen test the following day. After that, Sarah was the one to tell me I had the job.” They started filming three weeks later.

Patience and perseverance have been defining threads in Kelly’s career. It took 13 years to land his breakthrough role – the kind of slow-burn trajectory that dares you to reconsider the platitudinous clichés: that everything happens for a reason, that good things come to those who wait. Was any resentment towards the industry harboured? Or as he arrives here in his late thirties, does he feel equipped with an emotional stability thanks to his years in the wings? “I think the maturity level definitely helps with navigating all this extraneous stuff that comes along with these types of roles and this career path,” he says. “Had I been in this a little younger, I probably would have squandered it a little bit or utilised its advantages in the moment, but disadvantages down the road. So I’m grateful that I worked my butt off for so long with all of these nos, but continued to strive to do it.”

The ascent of those who make it to the top is often framed as a solo endeavour – his graft, his triumphs, his luck. But Kelly is quick to amend the balance, insisting the spoils are shared, most notably with his wife, who has been integral to his winning formula. “I’m so grateful I have a wonderful partner who is just so supportive, and in that I’m just confident and not complacent, but I’m secure. I’m safe,” he continues. “I know who I am, what I’m capable of, and I have this safety net to rely on, whereas I never had that before.”

Portraying a figure as adored, as closely observed, and as politically freighted as a Kennedy inevitably comes with baggage – public discourse included. Ryan Murphy’s Love Story proved no exception: the internet was set alight as soon as early images of the lead duo surfaced in New York during the first days of filming. There’s something almost meta about it – a neat echo of the show’s own subject matter, where press and paparazzi became an ever-present third party in John and Carolyn’s marriage in the nineties. It’s a pressure John navigated with a certain fluency, and one Kelly seems to have taken in his stride.

“A million per cent yes,” he says when I ask if he leaned on his character’s experience to navigate public life. “There’s a little bit of my portrayal of him that I kind of put back on [when doing press]. I did it in the show while there was real paparazzi at the same time as we were shooting. I got friendly with them. In between takes, there was always a crowd, because we were shooting in front of where they lived. And I would just go and chat with them, take photos for the paparazzi. I would always give them a shot with a smile. I’m not here to mess with anyone’s paycheck. I just tried to be a good dude and have fun with it. And I think exercising that has allowed me to have confidence and a comfortability in now having chats with people like yourself.”

Paul wears coat LOUIS VUITTON; blazer, jumper, trousers & belt GIORGIO ARMANI

In the early days of production, some of that paparazzi attention stoked a modest online storm challenging the accuracy of Love Story’s take on JFK Jr’s wardrobe. The circulation of shots showing Kelly and Pidgeon filming also drew uproar for the show’s supposed off-base reflection of Bessette’s buttery blonde locks. Fast-forward to days following Love Story’s release, Vogue published an article crediting the Disney+ show with making “‘Bessette Blonde’ Spring’s Chicest Hair Trend”. Column inches hailing the arrival of JFK Jr core were also endless, with Kelly its poster boy. Evidently, any fan worry was misplaced. But did those headlines sting when they first surfaced? “I don’t read them,” he says. “I really tried to be as much in the ’90s as I possibly could. I still try to keep that. I mean, I would love to have no cell phone. And I learned so much about myself, about John and Carolyn, the Kennedys, the Bessettes, everyone involved. And now it’s out there, people can enjoy it, they can hate it, they can do whatever. It’s got a life of its own.”

A daily blowout alongside costume designer Rudy Mance’s efforts did some heavy lifting in transporting Kelly back to the era’s particularly polished brand of bounce and breeze. But when it came to character preparation, the sheer volume of material on Kelly’s subject offered something rarer: the opportunity for a near-total immersion into his life, mannerisms and cadence. “Luckily for me, John was such a well-documented individual that I was able to just look anywhere. I’d do a little Google search, and there you go,” he says. “There are so many YouTube videos. My algorithm knew I had this thing, so all of a sudden it’s like the JFK Jr archive page.”

JFK Jr also narrated his father’s 1956 Profiles in Courage, which became a kind of unofficial soundtrack during production for Kelly, alongside deep dives into old issues of George, the magazine he founded and edited in the ’90s. “[The audiobook] was a really great asset to finding his voice and his cadence. In Canada, we pronounce things pretty well, whereas John was more of a New York lackadaisical, chill guy. So between that and his interviews, I’d go back to really lock into that calm, fun, witty, cool-as-a-cucumber demeanour.”

Elsewhere on set, inspiration came just as readily. He found himself sharing screen time with actors he’d long admired. Naomi Watts as Jackie, for instance. “Little did I know her breakthrough was much the same as mine, where she had been auditioning for a long time, and nothing was really happening, and when she was about to give up, she was cast in Mulholland Drive, and that’s it. The rest is history.”

The ascent of Kelly’s star does have illusory overnight qualities, even though, from his side, it never quite felt that way. And yet, as he takes stock – the attention, the front rows, the shoots and interviews, the early days of fatherhood – the thrill of being new to it all is palpable. At 37, America’s latest fixation seems to have the industry within reach and, for lack of a better phrase (his, not ours), is ready to “flex [his] muscles.”

“My life has changed in so many ways over the course of a couple of months. I would have just been happy doing bit parts, and all of a sudden I’m the guy. It’s very humbling, but it’s also so exhilarating.” As for what comes next? “My mind is swimming with ideas, what I want to do, what I’d like to do. I really want to play a villain. I think that would be so fun.”

He’s proudly “not internet-savvy”, though friends seem to be doing the legwork, tipping him off to the fact that DC Universe fans already have their eye on him amidst the DC Universe Batman casting frenzy. “The internet is going crazy with fan-casting at the moment,” he laughs, “and I wouldn’t say no…” One thing feels certain: the black cape and latex wouldn’t trouble America’s new sweetheart.

Love Story: John F Kennedy Jr & Carolyn Bessette is available to watch on Disney+ now

Photography

Nino Muñoz

Styling

Christian Stroble

Grooming

Kristen Shaw at The Wall Group

Casting Director

Kegan Webb

Producer

Natalia Saucedo de Goba

1st Photography Assistant