FROM FRIENDS TO FAMILY
Matthew Perry takes on ‘scary’ role of Ted Kennedy in show about the U.S. clan,
Playing a real person is daunting for an actor at the best of times.
But playing a member of the fabled Kennedy clan ratchets up the pressure.
Actor Kristin Booth had already been through it, having played Ethel Kennedy in the 2011 miniseries The Kennedys.
But Matthew Perry, who took on the larger than life role of Ted Kennedy in the followup After Camelot (Sunday, 9 p.m. on Bravo), was new to the tight-knit Kennedys cast and crew as well as the experience of playing an actual person.
“It was a very scary role to take on. For that reason, I took it on,” Perry said in a phone interview.
Perry, an American-born, Ottawa-raised actor best known for the TV comedy Friends, was offered the part while performing in London in The End of Longing, a play he wrote that begins off-Broadway in May.
Booth, who was born in Kitchener, Ont., sought out the role, doing her best to make herself look like Ethel for her first audition.
“I stuck my upper lip to my upper teeth. Basically it made my upper lip disappear,” she says about the audition. ”)
“The Kennedys are the U.S. royals,” Booth said in a separate phone interview, explaining the attraction of playing Ethel.
“And Ethel Kennedy was always the other wife, the other Kennedy woman. I thought, ‘What an opportunity to bring focus to her and what her life was like with Bobby.’”
For Perry, playing Ted involved “leaning into” the tragedy of the youngest Kennedy son’s story.
“Terrible things after terrible things happened to Ted Kennedy and we dramatize these. ‘OK, I have to cry here, I have to cry there. I have to tell my son he’s got cancer. Here, I have to defend myself from a murder charge.’
“Every day it was just relentless,” Perry said.
Indeed, the two-part, four-hour miniseries (the second half airs April 23 at 9 p.m.) opens with one of the most famous tragedies to befall the Kennedys, the shooting of Robert Kennedy in June 1968 at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.
Neither Ethel nor Ted can bear to pull the plug on Robert’s respirator in hospital the next day; it’s up to Jackie (a returning Katie Holmes), widow of assassinated U.S. president John F. Kennedy, to give the order.
Playing the hospital scenes had particular challenges for Booth.
One was that the death of Robert the character meant working without fellow Canadian actor Barry Pepper, which Booth said was like “missing a limb” at first. (Another Canadian, Kristen Hager, plays Ted’s wife, Joan, in After Camelot.)
“I realized halfway through my first day, ‘Oh my God, if you feel this lost without Barry, I can only imagine how Ethel must have felt without Bobby,’” Booth said.
The other challenge was playing a character who, by all accounts, didn’t cry at the bedside of her comatose husband.
“I personally am an extremely emotional person. I cry at long-distance telephone commercials,” Booth said.
“I would be absolutely sobbing. I had to retain it all, only let little bits of it out at a time, (but) I had to be boiling underneath.”
Perry said he enjoyed playing the good and bad sides of Ted, who “certainly did live in the shadows of his brothers.” Perry portrayed him from ages 36 to 67, with the help of facial prosthetics and a dialect coach to learn a Boston accent.
“The second half of his life, he became the ‘Lion of the Senate,’ ” Perry said. “He became this wonderful guy who did wonderful things. People don’t really remember him for that.”
What they remember is Chappaquiddick, when Kennedy drove his car off a bridge and into an inlet after leaving a party in July 1969, resulting in the death of 28-year-old campaign worker Mary Jo Kopechne.
Kennedy, who escaped the car but did not report the accident until the following day, pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of the accident and received a suspended jail sentence.
Perry said the “intense drama” of Chappaquiddick was the most fun to play.
He believes Kennedy did try to rescue Kopechne and that shock led him to drink and pass out in a hotel room, not notifying the Kopechne family of the accident until hours later. But of course, “no one knows exactly what happened there except for Ted,” who died in 2009.
Both Perry and Booth came out of The Kennedys with admiration for the characters they played.
“Really, I think I would just want to sit across from her and tell her how much I admire and respect her,” Booth said of Ethel, who just turned 89.
“I think she’s an incredibly strong woman to survive what she has been through . . . Even after losing Bobby, she continued on with her humanitarian work, raised those (11) kids and lost two children.”
Asked what he would say to Ted, given the chance, Perry answered: “Congratulations on turning your life around. What the hell happened at Chappaquiddick?”