How ‘Love Story’ Stars Portray Sisters Carolyn & Lauren Bessette

[This story contains spoilers from Love Story, episode seven, “Obsession.”]

Following last week’s episode of Love Story, “The Wedding,” John F. Kennedy Jr. (Paul Anthony Kelly) and Carolyn Bessette Kennedy (Sarah Pidgeon) return from their honeymoon. What should be the happiest time of their lives quickly turns miserable.

As they arrive back at their Tribeca apartment at 20 N. Moore St., paparazzi swarm their car, immediately making it clear that life as a newly married couple will be very different.

John, the son of former president John F. Kennedy, is used to living in the spotlight. Even he admits the scrutiny has intensified since the couple got married. So in an effort to calm things down, John suggests that if they pose for a couple of photos and let the photographers have their first shot as a married couple, they’ll back off. Except, it doesn’t stop. They continue camping outside the apartment at all hours.

As Carolyn struggles with the relentless attention, she confides in one person: her sister, Lauren Bessette (Sydney Lemmon).

“You should be talking to someone,” Lauren tells Carolyn, sensing her sister isn’t handling the attention well.

“I’m talking to you,” Carolyn responds.

Lauren and Carolyn reportedly became “even closer” in real life when Lauren moved to New York and Carolyn was dealing with heightened media attention.

Carolyn fully opens up to Lauren about how the stress of the scrutiny and the lies being spread about her in tabloids are affecting her. Earlier in the episode, she attends a meeting about a potential job at Ralph Lauren. But as she tries to leave, paparazzi are waiting outside, making it clear they would be a constant distraction at her workplace. She ultimately realizes she can’t take the job.

“I just feel like for as long as I can remember, I’ve known exactly who I am and what I want and now I just feel paralyzed,” Carolyn tells Lauren. “I’m terrified of making the wrong move or drawing any more attention to myself.”

When Lauren asks what John is saying about the situation, Carolyn admits there’s a disconnect because he’s never lost his anonymity before.

Lauren explains, “You could skip down the street with a smile on your face, and they would still find something to write about you because at the end of the day, a happy couple doesn’t sell papers. Every story needs an angle. A protagonist and an antagonist. John is the living embodiment of a protagonist, which means that you… only have one role that you can play.”

For Pidgeon and Lemmon, building their onscreen chemistry came easily. The pair already knew each other before the show, when they were both appearing in Broadway productions in 2024, one street apart. Pidgeon appeared in the musical Stereophonic, which earned her a Tony nomination, while Lemmon starred in the play Job.

Speaking with The Hollywood Reporter ahead of the series premiere, Pidgeon shared how excited she was when she learned Lemmon had been cast as Lauren.

“That relationship is so important. It was so important to Carolyn. So important to the story. It wasn’t just John and Carolyn that we lost that day. Lauren was there too and they were incredibly close as siblings. I have a sister, and I know how important that relationship is,” she says. “When I found out that Sydney was going to play Lauren, I was so happy that I already had this sense of familiarity and friendship with her, and that only grew when we were working together. There’s just a baseline that we didn’t even have to work at as actors. It was just there because Sarah and Sydney like each other and trust each other so much already.”

Pidgeon continued, “I’ve since gone to her house multiple times and hung out and had tea and crawled up on the couch. When we all got cast, she had Grace [Gummer] and I over for a little hang on her patio. It was just the beginning [of last summer] and sunny and beautiful. We all just got to hang out. I’m very, very lucky to have had Sydney throughout this. She’s just so incredible as Lauren.”

Lemmon echoed that sentiment, telling THR, “It was amazing to get to play sisters with someone who I love authentically. She was on Broadway at 45th, while I was on it at 44th. So a lot of homework was done for free building that chemistry and that connection that I hope people experience when they watch the show.”

While Carolyn was known for being a fashion icon and successfully climbing the ranks at Calvin Klein, Lauren was also very accomplished in her own right. She graduated from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, spent four years working at Morgan Stanley’s Hong Kong branch and was promoted to vice president while at the company in New York — a detail mentioned in the episode.

Lemmon explained the research she did to portray Lauren.

“I was really lucky, there were a lot of great books I got my hands on, Carole Radziwill’s book, RoseMarie’s [Terenzio] book. There’s a lot out there that gave me a feeling of fullness in my mind that I was able to then start to build the character out of,” she says. “I was so inspired by the photographs that exist. And, of course, many New Yorkers have stories, so I talked to people and did my detective work.”

While Lemmon admits she didn’t speak to anyone who knew Lauren personally, she still gathered stories when she could.

“It’s the sort of thing when someone asks, ‘What are you working on?’ And you say, ‘Oh, the JFK Jr. show,’ and they go, ‘Oh, I have to tell you about this time,’ that starts to build a gingerbread trail putting myself to the character.”

As the FX series is winding down to its final two episodes, audiences already know how the story will ultimately end. The pilot episode offered a glimpse of it, opening on July 16, 1999, with Carolyn, Lauren and John.

Lauren was with Carolyn and John when they died in a 1999 plane crash near Martha’s Vineyard. Lauren was 34 at the time, while Carolyn was 33. They also had another sister, Lisa Bessette, Lauren’s twin, who now lives a private life.

Series creator Connor Hines previously told THR that it was always important to him to make sure Lauren was honored in the series.

“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,” he said. “I think the relationship that Sydney and Sarah have is one of the more compelling parts of the series, and I really can’t wait for people to see that.”

Executive producer Brad Simpson added, “We want to remind people that Carolyn’s mom lost two daughters that day.”

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Love Story releases new episodes Thursdays at 6 p.m. PT/9 p.m. ET on FX/Hulu, streaming on Hulu. Check out all of The Hollywood Reporter‘s Love Story coverage here, including our premiere launch piece with the cast and crew as well as more interviews with Sarah Pidgeon, Paul Anthony Kelly, Dree Hemingway, Alessandro Nivola, showrunner Connor Hines and production designer Alex DiGerlando.