Ryan Murphy’s Love Story dominated the cultural conversation this year, and with awards buzz building, its costar reflects on privacy, performance, and portraying American royalty
Photography by OLIVIA MALONE
Styling by SAMANTHA TRAINA
Words by ROBERT HASKELL
On a crisp spring afternoon, with awards campaigning kicking up across Hollywood, Grace Gummer followed the lead of more than a few fashionable New Yorkers once they land in Los Angeles: She made her way to the Dries Van Noten store on La Cienega. Once there, she made a beeline for the archive section, a room where pieces from past seasons can be purchased by mavens who might have missed them the first time around.
“Vintage is kind of the only thing I fuck with,” Gummer tells me later that day over a cup of tea in the airy atrium of Soho House Holloway. “It gives me great joy to find something nobody else has. I asked the sales guy to show me stuff from the ’90s, and he said, ‘You know, the ’90s are really in right now.’ I laughed and said, ‘Thanks to us!’ ”
“Ryan Murphy is so good at giving women, especially my age and older, center stage.”
Gummer is referring, of course, to Love Story — Ryan Murphy’s addictive reimagining of the romance between John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette — and the way the hit show instantly brought Bessette’s sleek, pared-down dressing into the zeitgeist. White button-down shirts and boot-cut blue jeans, camel skirts, black coats, leather boots, and loafers: A clean ’90s minimalism has invaded visual culture anew. Gummer has seen the line of young women waiting outside C.O. Bigelow, the venerable New York apothecary where Bessette bought her tortoise headbands.
“Fashion-wise, the ’90s have always been my compass,” Gummer says. “The muted colors, the low-key elegance.” The past few months have found her bringing an array of serious and high-minded fashion to the likes of the Met Gala and the Vanity Fair Oscars party (with the support of the stylist Nicky Campbell, of viral TikTok fame). It comes as no surprise to those who know her: Gummer has always been into clothes. After college at Vassar, she studied costume design in Rome, then interned for Zac Posen.
“In the ’90s, I was in middle school. And I was cool — well, as cool as you can be in a small town in Connecticut,” she says. As an adolescent, Gummer chose her outfit the night before and laid it out in the shape of a person, including the headband, shoes, socks, and underwear. “Everything. Almost as if I could just get out of bed and slide into it. Fashion was always very important to me. It was a planned event. I had a dress code, and I’d get in trouble for breaking it: the skirt a little too short, the shirt unbuttoned a little too low. I was always pushing back because I knew what I looked good in.”
For Gummer, clothes were an essential inroad into the character of John’s sister, Caroline Kennedy, who went on to serve as an ambassador — to Japan under President Barack Obama and Australia under President Joe Biden. She recalls a particular 1980s Valentino striped shirt with a strong shoulder and buttons up to the neckline. Although she was a supporting player in the drama, Gummer bore a unique responsibility on Love Story: Of the story’s central figures, she played the only living one. “That was immensely delicate,” she says. “All I wanted was to honor Caroline Kennedy. My job was to find some connection to the truth, but it’s not a biopic. It’s a dramatization, so I wasn’t interested in any kind of impersonation. I was interested in sort of gathering pieces of her from what I knew, from what other people had told me about her, from what I’ve read, from what I’ve seen — pieces of a very private person.”
Kennedy’s son, Jack Schlossberg, has been sharply critical of the show, but it’s not clear if Caroline has seen it. “Honestly, I just hope I’ve done right by her,” Gummer says. “I have so much admiration for her. It must be really hard to see your family or yourself portrayed on-screen. I cannot imagine how it feels.”
Of course, Gummer knows a thing or two about life in the public eye. She’s the daughter of Meryl Streep, riding high on the back of The Devil Wears Prada 2. Her older sister, Mamie, and younger sister, Louisa, are also actors. (Their brother, Henry, is a musician.) She spent her early childhood in Brentwood. But after the Rodney King riots, the Northridge earthquake, and the O.J. Simpson trial, Streep and her husband, the sculptor Don Gummer, moved their family to Connecticut. Gummer was entering the third grade. “I kind of hated my parents for a while after we moved,” she says. “I loved rollerblading and going to pool parties. I was like, ‘Why are we moving to the cold, dark woods?’ But I think it was a really good decision. And was it protective? I think in some ways.”
In episode 7 of Love Story, there is a scene in which Caroline’s daughter asks Bessette about getting some candy from the doorman of her parents’ building during a party. They descend to find a swarm of paparazzi in the lobby, and moments later Caroline appears in search of her briefly missing little girl, none too happy at Bessette for placing her in the line of fire. “I can totally relate to that feeling, especially being a mother now and working in this business,” Gummer says. “But obviously, we were not the Kennedys. There wasn’t that amount of scrutiny and spotlight on my life. But I understand Caroline’s feeling. I was kept out of all of it for most of my life. I honestly thought I was going to be an Olympic swimmer or a fashion designer or a dancer. Basically, I grew up in the woods and played a lot of sports.”
When Gummer was living in Rome, a friend sent her a script for a play he was directing off-off-Broadway in the hope that she’d consider designing the costumes. “I read it, and I had not one single design idea,” she says. “All I wanted to do was say the words. So I thought, OK, I guess I should follow that instinct.” Gummer’s friend cast her in the lead role of that play (The Sexual Neuroses of Parents in 2008), her first job as a professional actor. The New York Times didn’t love the production but wrote of its star something that surely made both mother and daughter proud: “Ms. Gummer seems to have inherited her mother’s acting smarts.”
She has worked steadily since that time, but Love Story has given Gummer a lot more exposure. She was amused this season to hear herself described as an ingenue. “That was funny to me as I approach 40,” she says. (Gummer celebrated her big birthday in May. She asked her husband, the music producer Mark Ronson, to throw her a surprise party. It wasn’t really a surprise party, but it was an opportunity to get together with good friends and dance for many hours.)
“I’ve been working consistently, steadily, for 15 years on things that I also felt very proud of,” she says. That résumé includes roles in Noah Baumbach’s beloved Frances Ha and in Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere in 2025. Her TV credits include The Newsroom, American Horror Story: Freak Show, and Mr. Robot. Gummer — never exactly an anonymous person — is relishing her new recognition, largely because she’s proud of its source. “It’s just so much fun. Shakespeare himself wrote about the loves and lives of kings and queens and told their stories in a way that everyone could relate to, on a human level. That’s what this show is about.”
But Love Story is more than a love story. It’s also a meditation on lost innocence, a time before 9/11, when smartphones didn’t exist and Marlboro Lights were popular. It also coincides with a moment of considerable cultural backlash against the scourge of social media. “It was sort of the last time before we had the modern attention economy,” Gummer says. “That’s what’s brilliant about the show. It’s touching on all of that too, and showing a whole new generation of young people how cool it was not to have a phone. Someone who was doing my hair recently told me that there’s this thing called Nineties Night that kids do now in New York, where they leave their phones at home. The first place my mom brain goes is, That’s so dangerous! How could you not have a phone going out? But I didn’t have one. And I didn’t need one.”
“We were not the Kennedys. There wasn’t that amount of scrutiny and spotlight on my life.”
Gummer, Ronson, and their two young daughters live in downtown Manhattan, and they are, in her words, “New Yorkers through and through.” But two of her siblings and their families are in Los Angeles. There are now six Gummer grandkids under age 6, and time together out here has never been more precious. “I love L.A.,” she says. “I love eating a perfectly ripe avocado in February. I don’t want to live here. I like the spontaneity, the cynicism, the feeling of being in touch with the world and with other human beings that New York gives you.” But she relishes her Los Angeles vintage shopping. (Scout and Sielan Vintage are favorites.) She loves a few hours of pampering at Olympic Spa followed by Korean food.
And she loves to drive. In her 20s, when she lived in L.A. briefly, Gummer had a 1988 white Mercedes 500SL. “It was a hard-top vintage convertible, American Gigolo style,” she says. “Eight-cylinder engine, superfast, so sexy. It was a lemon.” She bought it while shooting Extant, a TV show produced by Steven Spielberg and starring Halle Berry. “One day I pulled into the studio, and Spielberg happened to be walking by. He said, ‘It’s a good thing you’re on this show if you’re going to own that car. Because the money you’re making is going right into it.’ He was right. But I wanted the full California experience, and I got it.”
With the possibility of award nominations coming her way, Gummer may have bought herself the full California experience once again. She’s entertaining multiple acting offers, although it’s too soon to speak of them. “I want to be the protagonist facing all the adversities,” she says. Playing Caroline Kennedy certainly provided a boot camp in resilience through adversity. “Ryan Murphy is so good at giving women, especially my age and older, center stage. I really love him for that. And maybe my lived experience up to this point has given me the ability to play someone like Caroline, to dip into the well. It happened at the right place and time in my life. The doors are opening now.”
Hair by BARB THOMPSON at Forward Artists.
Makeup by SABRINA BEDRANI at The Wall Group.
Interior design by ANTHONY BARSOUMIAN.
Landscape design by JOHN SHARP.
Shot on location at HAILEY RESIDENCE, courtesy of Patrick O’Neill.
Feature image: KHAITE top, $2,680, and skirt, price upon request. MANOLO BLAHNIK shoes, $795. ENGELBERT earrings and ring, prices upon request. CELINE sunglasses, $450.
This story originally appeared in the Summer 2026 issue of C Magazine.
Discover more STYLE news.
See the story in our digital edition
