Recreating Ted Kennedy’s worst night on screen
>> When Jason Clarke first read the script of Chappaquiddick, about a horrifying incident in the life of Senator Edward M Kennedy, he was shocked.
On the night of July 18, 1969, the young senator — brother of President John F Kennedy and Senator Robert F Kennedy, each murdered earlier in the decade — accidentally drove his car off a bridge into a pond on the Massachusetts island of Chappaquiddick. He escaped from the sinking car. His passenger, a young campaign worker named Mary Jo Kopechne, drowned.
Perhaps she could have been saved if Kennedy had reported the accident immediately. It took him 10 hours to make the call, however — a delay that, by most accounts, ended Kennedy’s chance of ever being elected president.
The story made big headlines the next day — but, the day after that, the Apollo 11 astronauts landed on the moon. Neil Armstrong’s famous “one step for a man” drove the details of Kennedy’s accident off the front pages.
Ultimately Kennedy pled guilty to a charge of leaving the scene of an accident, receiving a two-month suspended sentence. He was re-elected to the Senate and went on to an illustrious career, including a failed run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1980, in which the Chappaquiddick story was revived by his opponents.
After that, however, the scandal slipped out of sight again. Few people younger than 50 know anything about it — which included the 48-year-old Clarke until he read the script and was offered the role of Kennedy. Kate Mara plays Kopechne.
“I thought, ‘My God, how did he get from killing a woman in his car to being re-elected to the Senate?’,” the Australian actor recalled. “‘Do I want to do it? Can I do it? Should I do it? Who’s going to watch the lead actor do something like this for an hour and a half?’
“There’s a great challenge in playing men who are unlikeable.”
Clarke has tackled that challenge before. In Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002), he played a policeman who took mixed-race Aboriginal children from their parents and put them in re-education camps. In The Man with the Iron Heart (2017), he played Nazi leader Reinhard Heydrich, one of the main architects of the Holocaust.
“Ted’s a complicated figure,” Clarke said during an interview in a West Hollywood hotel suite. “He was full of hypocrisy, full of good and bad. But he came from one of the great liberal families. He saw two of his older brothers shot in the head. Possibly he was clinically depressed or at least going through an existential crisis. It’s like ‘Hamlet.’
“Do I think walking away from a woman in a car who might have been alive is redeemable? No,” he said. “You can work toward redemption or forgiveness, or you can make something of your life. He definitely did that, absolutely. He passed more legislation than most senators do in their entire life.”
To prepare, Clarke examined the detailed inquest report of Kopechne’s death. He also listened to the eulogy Kennedy gave at Robert Kennedy’s funeral, which he described as “heartbreaking”.
“You’re always taught in drama school to not judge your character,” said Clarke, who nonetheless admitted that he came to like Kennedy. “I spent a lot of time sitting in the wig, the prosthetics and the fat suit, and going over this time period and these events.
“It was horrible sometimes,” he continued. “Of course he knew what he was doing. It’s like a bird flies south in the winter. Going to the police station and then he rings [Mary Jo’s] mother. Of course that was the right thing to do. That shows me he was conscious. He knew what it meant to reach out and touch somebody.
“It’s not magical mystery,” Clarke concluded. “If you connect the dots, you’ll get there. I’m trying to show the dots that Ted connected. He’s confused and decides, ‘We’ll give them the truth, my truth. I did the best I could that night.’ There was just this constant pull inside Ted of trying to … “
He paused, searching for the words that could explain how the senator justified his thinking.
“… ‘I’m not going to be President.’ ‘Oh, what a selfish prick!’ ‘I deserve another shot. I deserve to be a senator,’” Clarke continued. “It’s symbolic of other things, realizing the importance of the presidency and what it is to the entire world, wanting to do good. It’s monumental, and people will do anything for it.
“Nobody wants to take responsibility for what they do,” the actor added. “A few years later Nixon said, ‘I wiretapped some dudes. What’s the problem? He killed a woman and got away with it.’ That was Watergate. Now we’ve got two sides that hate each other and don’t talk.”
Had Ted Kennedy gone on to the White House, history might have played out differently.
“This was a pivotal week in American history,” Chappaquiddick director John Curran said in a separate interview. “If the accident hadn’t happened, Kennedy would have skated into the presidency, beating Nixon. The Vietnam War would have ended earlier.”
When Curran came to the film, Clarke already had been cast as Kennedy. The director didn’t mind.
“Jason was i n my very first film, Praise (1998),” Curran said. “He’s a great, nuanced dramatic actor. He’s also a really funny guy.
“I knew he wouldn’t do an impression of Ted,” he continued. “He would make it his own. That’s a big thing for a film like this. If you don’t get that right, it could be laughable.”
Clarke’s experience playing a politician in the Showtime series Brotherhood (20062008) also helped — if only because, during production, he actually met Kennedy, who was attending a boat race in Hyannisport.
“Someone asked if I wanted to meet him,” Clarke said. “That’s a handshake I made sure I was switched on for when I made it.”
The series also gave the Australian actor some insight into American politics, since he was playing a member of the Rhode Island House of Representatives.
“Rhode Island is a very small state, and everybody knows the politicians,” he said. “Talk about the hands-on-ness, people-ness. It was like coming to a party with a family. I loved the ability to bring people in with a touch or a word, to really have that intimacy.
“Ted had it naturally,” Clarke said. “Of course he did. He was Jack’s brother. He was Bobby’s brother.”
To demonstrate, he put on his Ted smile, jumped up from his chair and stuck out his hand to be shaken. He might have kissed a baby had one been available.
Clarke has been one of Hollywood’s busiest actors in recent years, with credits that include Zero Dark Thirty (2012), The Great Gatsby (2013), White House Down (2013),
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014),
Everest (2015) and the critically lauded
Mudbound (2017).
He shot four films last year, including
Winchester, a horror movie released in February, and Serenity, a thriller in which he co-stars with Anne Hathaway, Diane Lane and Matthew McConaughey, scheduled to open in September.
Then there’s First Man, set for October release, about Nasa’s campaign to land a man on the moon. Ryan Gosling plays Neil Armstrong and Corey Stoll plays Buzz Aldrin, with Clarke as astronaut Edward Higgins White, who was the first man to walk in space but was killed in a fire during pre-launch test for Apollo 1.
In The Aftermath, a post-World War II drama, Clarke plays a British colonel living in Hamburg with his wife (Keira Knightley).
“People forget that Europe destroyed itself,” Clarke said. “Neighbours hated each other. It took years for people to come back together. My character is at the centre of that in Hamburg, and he cops a lot of flak for it.”
Clarke’s work year started on Jan 6, 2017, and finished on Dec 23. Don’t expect that pace to continue, though: He and his wife, French actress Cécile Breccia, already have a 3-year-old son and are expecting another son.
“It’s not just the shooting,” Clarke said. “It’s the preparation, it’s becoming the character. I’m not sure how much longer I can keep a schedule like that.”
He has resolved to put his family first and to try to replicate his own childhood for his sons as much as possible.
“I did a lot of things, when I was growing up, that I’m very grateful for,” he explained. “Living in the country, we didn’t have a whole lot of money. But we were a close, intimate family. We used our imaginations. My sons are going to have a different upbringing because of what I’ve chosen to do and where I am. I need to make sure I give them space and place.”
That has implications for his career, of course.
“Maybe I’ll do something more longterm, like a miniseries,” the actor said.
“I love the challenge of a new place, a new face, a new research, a new world,” Clarke admitted. “I like living these many lives.”