The Cast of 'Jackie' on Recreating JFK's Assassination

The assassination of John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963, is a defining moment of 20th century American history, one that remains eternally vivid in our collective consciousness thanks largely to Abraham Zapruder and his 8 mm footage of the event. The Dallas-based clothing manufacturer inadvertently captured President Kennedy’s death on film, in a clip that has been widely seen and closely analyzed over the ensuing decades. Even though the Zapruder film is an invaluable historical document, one could argue that its existence also blunts some of the trauma of that day. “We’ve seen [the footage] so many times, it doesn’t have any emotional content,” says Peter Sarsgaard, who plays Robert Kennedy to Natalie Portman’s Jackie Kennedy in Pablo Larrain’s acclaimed drama, Jackie. “You stop thinking about the people in the car dying.” (Watch our interviews above.)

The challenge facing Larrain and his cast, then, was communicating the shock and horror of that historical moment to contemporary audiences. As the cast tells Yahoo Movies, he accomplished that by putting viewers in that car alongside Jackie during her husband’s murder and the terror that followed. “He forces the audience to endure that experience for what feels like an interminable amount of time,” says Billy Crudup, who plays a journalist. “Then you begin to understand what a human being had to endure.” And according to Portman, shooting the assassination sequence really was an endurance test. “It was difficult on an acting level to feel that level of trauma, and also have this very specific idea of what you need to do.”

Jackie is opening in limited theaters on Friday.