Before There Was ‘Love Story,’ There Was ‘America’s Prince’: Hallmark Hunk Kristoffer Polaha Dishes on Playing JFK Jr. (Exclusive)
'JFK Jr. changed my life and the way that I moved through the world,' says the star—here's how
Long after his untimely death at 38 in 1999, John F. Kennedy Jr. is once again at the center of the cultural conversation thanks to the hit series Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette. The show, which stars Paul Anthony Kelly as the handsome political scion and Sarah Pidgeon as his stylish wife, has captivated viewers and gone viral with countless social media posts about the glamorous but ill-fated It Couple that defined the ’90s.
Love Story is hardly the first piece of media to explore JFK Jr.’s life and legacy, as he’s been the subject of many books and documentaries since his passing. Just a few years after JFK Jr. died, he was played by future Hallmark hunk Kristoffer Polaha in the 2003 TV movie America’s Prince: The John F. Kennedy Jr. Story, an adaptation of the 2000 bestseller The Day John Died. The movie also starred Ally McBeal and Arrested Development actress Portia de Rossi as Carolyn Bessette and ’70s sex symbol Jacqueline Bisset as Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
Polaha, the dashing star of Hallmark favorites like Dater’s Handbook, A Biltmore Christmas and A Grand Ole Opry Christmas (to name just a few of his many rom-coms on the channel) sat down with Woman’s World in 2024, and in the interview, he discussed the “overwhelming” experience of playing JFK Jr. Read on to see what he had to say about embodying a real-life icon in his breakout role.
How playing JFK Jr. changed Kristoffer Polaha’s life
The star of Love Story, Paul Anthony Kelly, was unknown before being cast as JFK Jr., and the same was true of Kristoffer Polaha. Prior to America’s Prince, Polaha had just a handful of TV guest appearances to his name, and looking back at when he was cast, he said, “It was a little overwhelming. Being an actor is really hard. The opportunities are few and far between, and there’s a lot of attrition that happens between wanting to do something and actually doing it.”
Originally, there were rumors that established actors like Ben Affleck and Ed Burns were being considered for the role of JFK Jr., but Polaha impressed director Eric Laneuville and won the pivotal part. To this day, the Hallmark star still marvels over how it all went down. “I was a junior in college at NYU and I was having a pretty bad semester, so I wrote a list of goals,” he recalled. “Of course, I was filled with the hubris that comes with wanting to be an actor. For my five-year goal, I wrote that I wanted to be a national figure by 2003, and the John F. Kennedy Jr. movie ended up airing in January of that year.”
“In a weird way, I met this goal that I had set for myself,” Polaha continued. “I remember walking in New York City and there was a giant poster of my face in Times Square. I went to the subway and my face was literally all over the station. I was like, ‘Holy cow, I just hit the motherlode.’ It felt like peaking too early. That was my first thing out of the gate, and 40 million people watched it. It was a big, big, big thing for me.”
An emotional connection to ‘America’s Prince’
Like many Americans, Kristoffer Polaha felt a deeply personal connection to JFK Jr. “When I got the job, I understood the responsibility of it,” he said. “I lived in New York City when he did and was keenly aware of him my whole life. My dad was a huge fan of his father as a president, and I grew up knowing all about John F. Kennedy. One of the films that had a huge impact on me was Oliver Stone’s JFK. It made me realize that narrative matters and the way you tell a story can shape people’s viewpoint.”
While Polaha was excited to play JFK Jr., he also felt the immense pressure of bringing a beloved figure gone far too soon back to life, and the actor threw himself into researching everything he could about him. “JFK Jr. changed my life and the way that I moved through the world,” he said. “One of the things I learned about John was that at a party he would spend so much time asking questions about the person he was talking to, and he never talked about himself, and everyone felt amazing after they had their interactions with him,” Polaha remarked. “He was genuinely curious about other people, and that was something that I immediately plugged into my brain. He had enough confidence to be humble.”
America’s Prince remains a highlight of Kristoffer Polaha’s career, and the charisma he displayed in the TV movie set him up to be one of Hallmark’s go-to leading men. “I was 23 years old when I played JFK Jr. I was a lot younger than he was when he died, and I had to play him in high school and then all the way up to his death, so the stakes couldn’t have been higher,” he said. “It was a really important moment in my life, and one I’m very proud of. It was really intense and symbolic and rife with so many different emotions,” and with the success of Love Story, America’s Prince is ripe for rediscovery.
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