Jacki Weaver will never forget the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
“I was 16 and doing my trigonometry homework when a neighbor called out over the [backyard] fence, ‘Kennedy’s been shot,'” recalls the Australian actress. “It was a shock.”
A Best Supporting Actress Oscar nominee for “Silver Linings Playbook,’’ Weaver plays the eccentric mother of assassin Lee Harvey Oswald in “Parkland,’’ making its North American premiere tomorrow at the Toronto International Film Festival.
“I love the way Americans wonder if we were as aware of the assassination in Australia,” the 66-year-old actress says before heading to Toronto from the South of France, where she’s filming a Woody Allen film. “[It] was enormous because John and Jackie Kennedy were considered beloved international royalty.”
Weaver says her “Parkland” character, Marguerite Oswald, likened herself to Jackie and to JFK’s mother — “a great mother in history” — while repeatedly insisting that her son, who had defected to Russia and was deported back to the US, was really a CIA agent.
“Based on my own research, she liked to pretend she and her son were grander than they really were,” Weaver says. “She was quite paranoid and quite the looney-toon.”
The actress studied hours of the many TV interviews Marguerite Oswald gave before her death in 1981.
“If I had invented the character, people would think she’s over the top,’’ Weaver says. “But that’s the way she was in real life.’’
The actress says she’s most fascinated by the film’s sequences she’s not in — the fruitless struggle of staffers in the primitive emergency room of Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas (Zac Efron, Marcia Gay Harden and Colin Hanks among them) to save the lives of Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald, who himself was gunned down two days later.
“We’re used to seeing graphic depictions of emergency rooms on TV, but the medical technology of that era was brutal in a way they never showed in movies from that era,’’ she says.
“Parkland,” which also stars Paul Giamatti as Abraham Zapruder — the businessman who captured home-movie footage of the bullets striking JFK — hits US theaters Oct. 4, ahead of the 50th anniversary of the assassination on Nov. 22.
Weaver says, “I still get a little tearful when I watch Walter Cronkite’s eyes welling up when he reads the news.”
“Parkland” doesn’t take a position on whether Oswald acted alone in killing JFK.
“There’s still a lot of contention about that, and we let you make up your own mind,’’ Weaver says. “Maybe we would have found out a lot more if Jack Ruby hadn’t killed Lee Harvey Oswald. I’ve got a lot of dyed-in-the-wool conspiracy theorists in my own family.’’