Rob Lowe Likens Playing JFK in 'Killing Kennedy' to Playing Hamlet
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'Shakespeare made a career writing about the royals. The Kennedys are sort our royals... then it's like playing a character from Shakespeare,' the President Kennedy depicter in Nat Geo's movie says.

AceShowbiz - If Rob Lowe's recent thought is to be adopted by others, then Americans have their own royals. Speaking at a "Killing Kennedy" panel during the Television Critics Association summer press tour, the actor compared the Kennedys to royal characters in William Shakespeare's plays.

"Shakespeare made a career writing about the royals. The Kennedys are sort our royals, and if you believe that concept, then it's like playing a character from Shakespeare," Lowe said on Wednesday, July 24. "Actors play Hamlet all the time. ... A lot of people will play JFK in the future. It's just one of our great American icons."

Writer and executive producer Kelly Masterson drew another comparison to famous playwright Shakespeare when uttering their goal with "Killing Kennedy". She told reporters, "Shakespeare told the stories of the people of history, and that's what we wanted to do."

On his approach to play John F. Kennedy, Lowe revealed, "For me it was very much about capturing him as a man. We all know the inconography of Kennedy. I was really interested in the details of what he was like as a father, as a brother, as a son, as a husband, as a flawed and complicated and heroic guy -- where those small details live."

Appearing via satellite from Vancouver, Ginnifer Goodwin who plays First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy chimed in, "I wanted the story I was telling of Jackie [to be] angled on everything she said about herself and not the way others described her. All we have are the things Jackie said after the fact, and I hope in that way we humanized these people. I don't think they've been fully humanized in the past."

Of "Killing Kennedy" book author Bill O'Reilly's conservative politics, Lowe said, "I didn't really think about it at all because the book has come out and been so successful." He added, "Any time you can do material that has already proven to be of value is a good. To me, that was as far as I saw it. The book is nothing if not straightforward about the facts."

The self-declared "lifelong fan" of Kennedy went on calling recent U.S. presidents "bad actors" when claiming that they're trying to be like JFK. "Every president today talks like him," so he stated. "They all just are like, excuse me, bad actors who found the greatest one who ever was and did their variation of that performance. Every single one of them."

Still at the TCA, Lowe said that he might play another president of the U.S. as funding is slowly coming together for a film about Ulysses S. Grant, in which he would play the 18th POTUS.

"Killing Kennedy", also starring Will Rothhaar as Lee Harvey Oswald and Michelle Trachtenberg as Marina Oswald, will premiere in November to mark the 50th anniversary of Kennedy's death.

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