Rob Lowe lost it when he saw John F. Kennedy’s black limousine. It was a black stretch bubble-top Lincoln Continental, a replica of the car in which Kennedy would become a sitting duck in Dallas’ Dealey Plaza.
During a lull in production on the Richmond, Va., set of “Killing Kennedy,” Lowe, 49, looked around and saw two Teamsters, one backing up the car, and the other showing where it needed to go.
That’s when it hit him. “I realized it was the limousine and I started to cry.”
At the same time, clouds started to swirl overhead, whipping an angry sky into torrents of wind and rain. Says Lowe, who was still in the womb when President John F. Kennedy was shot 50 years ago this month, “The rainstorm that broke out was so violent that we had to shut down production and take shelter. And I thought, ‘Even Mother Nature doesn’t want to do this scene.’”
“Killing Kennedy” is based on the pulpy best-seller by conservative commentator Bill O’Reilly and co-writer Martin Dugard. And the story, beginning in 1959, sets in motion the collision course between Kennedy and his assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, an angry loner looking to make his mark. Kennedy is about to announce his presidential candidacy. Oswald, a former Marine, is at the US Embassy in Moscow, renouncing his American citizenship. One is full of optimism and purpose. The other is adrift, trying to find somewhere to belong.
The TV movie also zooms in on the wives: Jackie Kennedy, played by Ginnifer Goodwin, and Marina Oswald, played by Michelle Trachtenberg. Trachtenberg performs most of her role in Russian, duplicating Marina’s poor English, and emphasizing the isolation she felt during her marriage. Both women fear for their husbands: Jackie, because of numerous threats; Marina, because her husband bought a mail-order rifle.
Lowe was fascinated with the president from a young age, reading countless books and watched many hours of footage when he was cast in the film. It wasn’t just the clipped Boston accent he wanted to capture; he wanted to move like the man, wearing a back brace and hitching up his left arm in a way that only Kennedy’s closest friends knew was compensation for crippling back pain.
Kennedy’s back problems were largely attributed to injuries suffered when his Navy patrol boat, PT-109, was sunk in World War II. But scholars now believe that his vertebrae may have begun deteriorating as a result of the steroids he took for severe intestinal problems in the late 1930s. “Everyone close to him knew he was very ill and in a lot of pain,” Lowe says. “But now, with his medical records coming out fairly recently, we know his medical struggles were quite extraordinary.”
Despite his clinical approach to playing the role, Lowe still wasn’t prepared for the emotion he felt when it came time to re-create the doomed motorcade. “I was in such shock,” he says. “I feel like I was there, even though I wasn’t. When we did it, I had to disassociate myself from what we were doing. I had to treat it as if it wasn’t happening.”
Oswald is played by Will Rothhaar, who bears a chilling resemblance to the actual killer. For Rothhaar, a native of New York City, the part brings a childhood story full circle. “When I was growing up, my grandmother lived in Dallas,” says Rothhaar, 26. “And every time I’d visit, she’d take me to the Texas School Book Depository.” By the time he was 10, Rothhaar had visited the infamous site no fewer than six times. In “Killing Kennedy,” he would be called upon to stand in a replica of that sixth-floor window, aim his Italian Carcano bolt-action rifle, and fire.
“All of that was very intense,” ,says Rothhaar. “When I was up in the window, shooting down at the street. Afterwards, the producers said, ‘Yo, you just gave me crazy goosebumps.’”
Rothhaar, who studied Oswald for months, says he feels compassion for the man Lowe refuses to call by name. “I make a point of never mentioning that name, ever,” says Lowe. “I just call him The Bad Guy.” But Rothhaar regards the gunman as a broken soul. “There was one night when I was going over the things that he dealt with growing up,” he says. “His father died of a massive heart attack two months before he was born. His mother moved to so many cities that he was never able to put down roots. There was a lot of neglect and lack of love. People say, ‘If you could go back in time, what would you ask him?’ And I say, ‘I wouldn’t ask him anything. I’d show him some love and give him a hug.’ ”
Lowe says that he hopes “Killing Kennedy” will remind people that aside from being the president, a war hero, and an icon, John F. Kennedy was a man. “A husband, a son, a father,” says Lowe, who adds that in doing this production, he learned something new about the tragedy. “I’m so shocked that I didn’t realize this before — I somehow missed it: John Jr.’s birthday is the day that he saluted his dead father. When I read that, I thought, that has to be a mistake. It’s such a small detail, but such an emotional one. And to me, that just continues to be a reminder that this continues to be a story that we think we know everything about, and we don’t.”