Tori Spelling says watching Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette sent her straight back to the ’90s. Speaking with PEOPLE on Friday, May 1, the 52-year-old actress said the FX series took her to some really good memories and made it nice to reflect on that era with her teens.
Spelling said she especially enjoyed seeing the story with a new generation at home. She said it was “really cool” to tell her children stories about that time and to watch them connect it to the present, adding that her kids are fascinated by ’90s fashion and are “really into fashion, every single one of them in a different way.”
The series premiered on FX on Feb. 12 and wrapped in March. It follows the romance of John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette in the years leading up to their deaths in a 1999 plane crash, with Sarah Pidgeon playing Bessette, Paul Anthony Kelly as Kennedy and Naomi Watts as Jackie Kennedy Onassis.
For Spelling, the show landed at a moment when her own family was already part of the same conversation. She shares five kids with ex Dean McDermott: Liam, 19, Stella, 17, Hattie, 14, Finn, 13, and Beau, 9.
The friction in the story is not nostalgia itself, but how it travels across generations. Spelling said fashion was the hook, but what her kids responded to was the feeling behind it. As she put it, “Fashion is about how it makes you feel,” and “it’s about finding your unique perspective.”
That is why the series matters to her now: it is not just a look back at John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, but a way of handing the decade to children who know it only as something parents talk about. For Spelling, the answer to whether it resonated is already clear. It did, and it opened a family conversation she says can still be carried forward.
