Daryl Hannah has attacked Ryan Murphy’s smash hit TV series Love Story in an essay for the New York Times.
The much-watched drama, which tells of the romance between John F Kennedy Jr and Carolyn Bessette, features Hannah as a character, played by Dree Hemingway. Hannah and JFK Jr were in a relationship in the early 1990s.
“I have generally chosen not to respond to media coverage of me,” Hannah writes. “I have long believed that engaging with distortion often amplifies it. But a recent tragedy-exploiting television series about John F Kennedy Jr and Carolyn Bessette features a character using my name and presents her as me. The choice to portray her as irritating, self-absorbed, whiny and inappropriate was no accident.”
Hannah goes on to quote one of the producers of the show calling her character an adversary in an interview. “Storytelling requires tension,” she writes. “It often requires an obstacle. But a real, living person is not a narrative device. There is also a gendered dimension to this thinking. Popular culture has long elevated certain women by portraying others as rivals, obstacles or villains. Isn’t it textbook misogyny to tear down one woman in order to build up another?”
She calls the show’s version of her “not even a remotely accurate representation”, criticising her portrayal as someone who does cocaine, which she denies ever doing, as well as other negative assertions about her character. “It’s appalling to me that I even have to defend myself against a television show,” she writes. “These are not creative embellishments of personality. They are assertions about conduct – and they are false.”
Hannah claims she has received “hostile and even threatening” messages since the shown has aired.
The actor’s essay follows a similarly fiery response from JFK Jr’s nephew Jack Schlossberg last week. “If you want to know someone who’s never met anyone in my family, knows nothing about us, talk to Ryan Murphy,” he said in a CBS interview. “The guy knows nothing about what he’s talking about, and he’s making a ton of money on a grotesque display of someone else’s life.”
In an interview with the Hollywood Reporter, producer Brad Simpson defended the show as a project “made with sincerity” while actor Sarah Pidgeon, who played Bessette, said Schlossberg “has every right to share how he feels about it”.
Since its launch in February, Love Story has set a streaming record for Disney. With 25m hours of viewing for the first five episodes, it’s become the most watched FX limited series to date.
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