Wedding bells are ringing.
The hit FX series “Love Story,” dramatizing John F. Kennedy Jr’s (Paul Anthony Kelly) relationship with Carolyn Bessette (Sarah Pidgeon), finally saw the couple make it to the altar in Thursday’s episode, “The Wedding.”
“We built the church. It is exactly that perfect replica,” director Gillian Robespierre exclusively told The Post.
Produced by Ryan Murphy, the show is a dramatized account of the relationship between Kennedy and Bessette, who married in 1996, and died in a 1999 plane crash, with Kennedy in the pilot seat. The son of former President Kennedy was 38, Carolyn was 33, and her sister Lauren, who died with them, was 34.
The real couple married on Georgia’s exclusive Cumberland Island. It was a private ceremony with only around 40 guests, at the First African Baptists Church, a humble one-room structure.
On the show, they filmed the sequence on a farm in Spring Valley, New York, and it took twelve days.
The replica of the church they built, “was a very small chapel, probably the size of a studio apartment,” Robespierre said.
“There was no electricity. Everything was illuminated by candles or flashlights. The production designer did a lot of research and pulled as many photos as he could find. There weren’t actually many photos [of the real event].”
She recalled asking the production designer if they could make the church “a little bit bigger” to accommodate the cameras and equipment for filming.
But ultimately, “we decided not to. It actually worked out perfectly. It was so great that it was exactly that size. It forced us to be really intimate.”
Robespierre, who also directed episodes of “And Just Like That” and “Only Murders in the Building,” said that because the real couple’s wedding was so private – and there was no social media back then to document it – she focused more on mood rather than directly capturing reality.
“We have no idea what went on in that tiny little chapel. We really wanted to capture the essence of their romance [and] of this specific wedding. They’re royalty in some ways, and yet they had a very DIY wedding.”
The production even added some surprising bells and whistles that didn’t happen in real life.
For instance, she explained, at the reception after John and Carolyn marry the script said, “the golden couple levitates onto the dance floor.”
Robespierre said it was only supposed to be a turn of phrase, but she came up with the idea “to actually levitate our actors.”
She noted that it was “very subtle. It’s not like they were flying in the sky, but [it happened] ever so slightly.”
To accomplish that, “we dug a hole in the ground of the lawn that we shot on, and we put in a hydraulic lift with a spinning disc on it. And our actors, Sarah and Paul, got on top of that, and we raised them up.”
They were boosted about four to five feet off the ground.
Kelly and Pidgeon were both “so game” to do it, the director noted.
“It’s supposed to be their best day ever, their most magical moment. And they’re feeling very close to each other, but they’re also elated and feeling higher than everyone else. So, we levitated them.”
For the reception, which was under a tent, they did use some real photos for reference.
“But we were just trying to build something that felt like it was just the two of them, and everyone else was just sort of fuzzy feeling around them.”
In addition to the “levitation mechanism,” they also had “a circular dolly track around them.”
“So the camera was a foot away from them while they were dancing and talking, and we were just circling them, capturing them.”
“Love Story” airs on FX and weekly on Thursdays (9 p.m.) and Fridays on Hulu.