Is it odd to call a woman an ingénue weeks from her 40th birthday? I tell Grace Gummer that some viewers might see her that way. She’s delighted. “I’ll take it!” she cries from a velvet booth in the dimly lit lobby of the Marlton Hotel in Greenwich Village. “That makes me feel so much better about myself.”
Gummer has been acting since 2010—in films like Frances Ha and Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere as well as on television shows like Mr. Robot and American Horror Story—but it would’ve been easy to miss her. Onscreen, she has the sort of subdued magnetism that rounds out an ensemble rather than elbows its way to the center.
Now, thanks to her role as Caroline Kennedy in Love Story—Ryan Murphy’s glossy dramatization of the public (and volatile) courtship between John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette—she is poised to step more clearly into view. In a mix of strong personalities, Gummer’s Caroline operates as a cool counterweight—JFK Jr.’s clear-eyed older sister who helps to ground a narrative rife with pageantry. The limited series marks her fifth collaboration with Murphy, whom the actor praises for his ability to reframe well-trodden, familiar cultural phenomena as something that will enrapture today’s audiences. Love Story, she tells me, “really trains a lens on why we react collectively to certain events.”
React, we have. In addition to reigniting interest in ’90s Calvin Klein minimalism, the show has become a watercooler event—an elegy for an older Manhattan, when paparazzi flashes still felt novel and love stories unfolded across glossy magazine spreads. “It’s hitting something right now for everybody,” Gummer says of the show’s reception, taking time to parse what she means. “Everyone wants a love story … and no one is immune to an ill-fated one.” The finale—which inevitably depicts the 1999 plane crash that killed the couple—leans fully into the push-and-pull between glamour and tragedy at the tale’s center. It’s also Gummer’s favorite episode.
“Everyone wants a love story, and no one is immune to an ill-fated one.”
When Gummer arrives at the Marlton, there’s no flutter of nervous energy at the front desk, no conspiratorial whisper. Though she’s thoroughly ensconced in the entertainment world’s most elite circles—she’s the second daughter of Meryl Streep and married to record producer Mark Ronson—the host doesn’t usher us to the cozier side of the lobby. While we wait for a table, we’re spotted by comedian Jeff Ross, who excitedly asks after her husband following a recent win at the BRIT Awards. Ross recommends the hotel’s highly regarded club sandwich; Gummer opts for the lentil salad and apologizes for any loud chewing. It’s clear she’s a regular.
Nearly anonymous moments like this are not the exception for Gummer. When I draw parallels between the omnipresence of celebrity in her life and in Caroline Kennedy’s—who fiercely protects her privacy in the show—Gummer pushes back. “I didn’t have that kind of scrutiny,” she says, noting instead that she was raised in a tiny, secluded Connecticut town by “a very famous mother,” but never sensed herself to be in the public eye. She only realized the true scale of her mother’s impact on a vacation they took when she was around 10, as the family attempted to make its way through the airport. “I don’t think I understood the magnitude of it all until that experience,” she says.
Even then, the often perverse level of public curiosity never quite extended to her personally—at least not until she began dating Ronson. The pair met during the pandemic through a mutual friend, the singer Lykke Li, and the relationship advanced at rom-com pace. “People were interested in us,” she recalls, still amused by the idea. “That was very new to me.” Before long, there was a house, then an engagement, a wedding, and two daughters.
In Love Story, Gummer’s Caroline exists slightly on the fringes of spectacle, grounding her younger brother like a ballast. “This whole show is about love: love triumphing over adversity within a marriage, but also the love between Carolyn and John,” she says. “Through all the tragedy and public scrutiny, they have each other. She becomes his voice of reason.”
Gummer was still too young in the ’90s to register the cultural saturation of JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette in real time, so for the series, she had to learn the contours of the phenomenon through research. Caroline—at least through Murphy’s eyes—is reserved and somewhat steely, but Gummer lets small flickers of feeling (the flash of an apologetic smile, for example) slip through the armor, allowing her to come off as more protective than aloof.
“People were interested in us. That was very new to me.”
Having never met her subject, she focused on capturing an essence rather than attempting imitation. This often happens sartorially: “I find a character through costume fittings,” she says. Before acting, Gummer worked with the legendary Oscar-winning costume designer Ann Roth and interned for Zac Posen. The interest was sparked early, and the instinct stuck. As a child, she would lay out her school outfit—headband, socks, right down to the underwear—on the floor in the shape of a body, as if she might simply step into it whole.
To embody Caroline, a woman she describes as “more of a lady” than herself, Gummer relied on immaculate tailoring and buttoned-up cardigans. She did manage to incorporate a few pieces of her own: loafers, vintage jeans, a simple Cartier diamond necklace. Gummer’s well-stocked closet of vintage treasures made the transition from character to real life seamless.
“I wake up and think about clothes,” she tells me. Today, she mostly shops secondhand, even for her children. (Scout in LA and Colbo on the Lower East Side are her go-tos.) These sartorial appetites have made the actor a quiet fixture on the fashion circuit. During the most recent New York Fashion Week, she made appearances at Khaite, Proenza Schouler, and Tory Burch, and again at Calvin Klein alongside her husband. A few weeks later, the couple wore custom Celine at the BRIT Awards in London.
When she’s not at fashion week or on a film set, Gummer spends her days at home with her daughters. She’s currently facing down the “terrifying but awesome” prospect of having no projects on the horizon. “You’re always out of work as an actor,” she observes, expressing hope that her next role will be a leading one. “I know that nowadays you have to do it all, but I just want to be one thing. I want to be an actor.” She laughs. “I’m turning 40—thank God I know what I’m good at.”
Creative Direction by Studio&
Hair by Panos Papandrianos
Makeup by Romy Soleimani
Lighting Direction by Clay Howard Smith
Digital Tech by Anthony Miller
Project Management by Chloe Kerins
Photography Production by Andrew Chung
Photography Studio Management by April Ellis
Styling Assistance by Mike Snavely, Halle Klum, and Delaney Kim
Makeup Assistance by Jackie Piccola
Hair Assistance by Harley Beman
Lighting Assistance by Rufus Barkley
Runner: Angelo Capacyachi
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