Rob Lowe will be playing one of America’s most famous presidents, the late John F. Kennedy, in the upcoming television movie ‘Killing Kennedy,’ adapted from Fox News host Bill O’Reilly’s book of the same name.
Yahoo! reports that Lowe chatted about the role while at the first day of the Television Critics Association Summer Tour 2013 on Wednesday July 24 while in Beverly Hills.
"We don't have a royal family here, right? Shakespeare made a career writing about the royals. Kennedys are sort of our royals and if you believe that concept then it's like playing a character from Shakespeare. Actors play Hamlet all the time," Lowe said to reporters.
"[He's] just one of our great American icons," the actor continued. "But, in terms of how you look at it, you just try and figure what you can individually bring [to the role], and for me, it was very much about capturing him as a man. We all know the iconography of Kennedy. I was really interested in the details of what he was like as a father, as a brother, as son, as a husband, as a flawed and a complicated and a heroic [figure]."
Adapted from O’Reilly’s book, the made-for-television film examines the lead-up to Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. The release of the fim in November will coincide with the 50th anniversary of Kennedy’s death.
Lowe, who was born four months after JFK’s death, went on to explain that he took the role in hopes of parlaying the tragic story to younger generations. "It was such a psychic trauma to us that I don't really think anybody can have the experience that we had with this loss and one of the things that I was drawn to doing was to reintroduce these generations to what this meant to this country because people have -- I don't know if forgotten is really the right word -- but that visceral ownership of that moment is not being passed on to the newer generations.”
"This will be the 50th anniversary and I could not be prouder to be with these people to try and reintroduce to people who might not know the details of what it meant to this country to lose him."
In the movie, JFK’s alleged killer Lee Harvey Oswald will be played by Will Rothhaar. Lowe said he believes in the lone gunman theory.
"I've come around to thinking that they got it right, that Oswald did act alone," he said.
"I think it scares us to think that things can be that simple and huge, horrible things can happen by the act of one person," he added. "We like to think there's a safety net and most times, there isn't and that's in the end why you come back to thinking it was the act of a madman."
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