This Actor Has Played JFK in Six Different Movies

It’s official: Caspar Phillipson is Hollywood’s JFK guy. After all, he has played the legendary American president six times in the last six years. The latest iteration: opposite Angelina Jolie in Netflix’s Maria Callas biopic, Maria.

He began his journey as the go-to actor to play John F. Kennedy, Jr. in movies with Pablo Larraín’s Jackie back in 2016 — ironically, his first portrayal of the president saw him stepping into his shoes in his final moments on the day of his assassination in 1963.

Soon after came a short film in which he played an imagined JFK—a JFK who was not killed, but who was instead able to deliver the speech he was on his way to give the day of the assassination. A few years later, Phillipson once again slicked back his hair and suited up to play Kennedy in Project Blue Book. This time, he embodied him as a young senator who became drawn into a conspiracy theory about UFOs in the 1950s.

In 2022 came Blonde, Andrew Dominik’s controversial Marilyn Monroe biopic, in which Phillipson’s JFK made a brief but infamous appearance in an imagined rape scene set in 1962. Then, in 2023, Phillipson tapped in as JFK again, this time, playing the president during a pivotal 1961 political moment in the Swedish film Hammarskjold. And finally, this year, Phillipson returns to JFK once more with a cameo in Larraín’s Maria that sees JFK meeting with the operatic diva in 1962.

Phillipson’s six portrayals of Kennedy each see him playing a slightly different version of the president at a slightly different time. But in each, Kennedy comes to life on screen thanks to Phillipson’s striking resemblance and uncanny vocal imitation.

Despite the resemblance, however, becoming “Hollywood’s JFK guy” wasn’t exactly an obvious route for the actor. Growing up in Denmark, he never imagined his acting career would take him to Hollywood, much less that he would one day become known for playing one of America’s most revered political icons. In fact, the name Kennedy meant very little to the young Phillipson. “In Denmark, people are not so obsessed with the Kennedys as people are in the States,” he explains. “So I was never [compared] to him.”

All of that changed when he met New York Actor Studio legend Frank Corsaro. “He was in Denmark at the Film Institute here, doing method acting classes,” says Phillipson. Although Phillipson wasn’t entirely sold on “the method,” he did come away with something else. “I just remember this short, old, gruff man saying, ‘You need to play Kennedy someday!’”

Another actor might have been mildly amused by the encounter and moved on — but not Phillipson. His acting career began in the ’90s. He worked in Danish film, TV and theater and later did a few plays in London. All of this time, he never forgot Corsaro’s comment. "I studied the pattern of speech of the Kennedys—just in case," he says, now speaking in his own voice—it’s a soft, vaguely European intonation that couldn’t be further from JFK’s distinctive New England tones. “I think I was hoping maybe on a British stage, or maybe, if I was lucky, on Broadway, I might one day be able to play one of the Kennedys.”

What drove him to prepare for a role he didn’t even yet have? “I have a friend whose life philosophy is that you have to hold out your hand in case an orange drops from above—you have to be ready to catch it,” says Phillipson thoughtfully. “This was very much a case of that.”

In 2015, the opportunity finally did come. Phillipson was in Istanbul working with a Danish theater company on an international production of Hamlet when a friend from Denmark got in touch. “He called me up and said, ‘There’s this audition for a French production where they’re looking for a look alike of Kennedy.’”

Phillipson sent in an audition tape he had made on his phone from his hotel room. After another self-tape, Phillipson got the call: He’d landed the part. Of course, he still didn’t know what the project actually was. “I think I had been auditioning for a French educational video or something like that,” he says. “But it turns out it was way bigger than expected.” It was, of course, a role opposite Natalie Portman in Pablo Larraín’s Jackie.

The 2016 film follows Jackie Kennedy in the moments after her husband’s death in 1963. Initially, Larraín planned to use Phillipson only as a glorified body double who would re-enact the infamous assassination on the streets of Dallas. But after he met Phillipson, the role grew. “Pablo was obviously happy to actually find an actor for it, rather than just a body match,” he says. Phillipson not only stood in as JFK for what became a grueling, minute-by-minute recreation of the assassination, but also had the chance to join Portman for a number of touching flashback scenes.

After embodying Kennedy in Jackie, Phillipson’s obsession with Kennedy only grew. Not only did he find himself drawn to the enigmatic man behind the legend, he became fascinated by his political prowess. “While preparing for Jackie, I had studied the speeches of Kennedy—the speeches are incredible. I mean, they’re really relevant today," he says.

It was, by this time, 2017—Donald Trump had just been elected for the first time. “There was, let’s say, a feeling of anguish in the community about what this would all mean,” he says. Phillipson found himself compelled to bring these speeches back to life. “Together with a Danish journalist mate of mine, we did a few live performances of the speeches,” he says. “We did it in Washington, D.C., at the American University, and at Martin’s Tavern, which was famous for being the place where he proposed to Jackie.”

One of the speeches that Phillipson found himself drawn to was the one that JFK never got the chance to deliver—the speech that he was on his way to give when he was shot. “The subject of that speech is misinformation, which in 2017 was massive,” he says. “We were kind of shocked by how much the speech resonated.”

Phillipson showed the speech to director Randal Kleiser, who decided to film Phillipson delivering the speech to a crowd of French filmmakers during the Los Angeles City of Dreams festival. This short film became Phillipson’s second credit as JFK. “In a sense, it’s an extension [of the version of JFK I played in Jackie], but it’s also completely different from Jackie, because it’s about the political interest of what I think President Kennedy had to say to the world," he says. “And it’s through the lens of the Trump presidency.”

In fact, Phillipson doesn’t see any of his JFKs as the “same” character. After all, in each project, Phillipson hasn’t just been playing Kennedy, he’s been playing a version of Kennedy as seen through another’s eyes. “It’s not about him, it’s about telling the story of someone else who was in touch with him,” he says. As such, each portrayal is always tinted with a new color. “I think all of these fictional iterations of Kennedy that I’ve been so fortunate to find myself in, they’re so very, very different. In the audience’s eyes, it is the same person, but I’m also telling the story of Maria or Marilyn or Jackie through their eyes.”

Some of his projects, like the short film, see him playing a pivotal figure within political systems. “Take Hammarskjöld‚" he says. “[Dag Hammarskjöld] was the Secretary General of the United Nations who died in a plane crash—nobody really knows why that took place. There’s been all sorts of speculation,” he says. “In that film, which I think lots of Americans haven’t seen, it’s very much about the political power of the US at the time — how important the US was in helping liberate former colonies.”

Digging into JFK’s political history is, for Phillipson, endlessly fascinating. “This is one of the top icons of all time in our conscience. Politically, he’s massively inspiring,” he says, before he adds in a careful tone, “I think we miss him in many ways.”

And then there are the more intimate, personal perspectives of the man behind the legend.

"Jackie and Blonde and now Maria are much more intimate, personal points of view," he goes on. Blonde in particular, he is careful to note, is an entirely fictionalized version of the famous president—his brief appearance in the film features a graphic sexual assault in which the president forces Monroe to perform oral sex. “In that film, he became a proponent of the patriarchy, which, at the time, could do whatever they wanted,” he says. “There’s no one claiming that that’s the truth [of what happened], but he becomes the symbol of the abuse that many women [experienced at the hands of] powerful men.”

In this year’s Maria, Phillipson plays a “more melancholy” president. In the film, Kennedy meets with Maria Callas the morning after his birthday—the same birthday that saw Monroe performing her fabled breathy rendition of “Happy Birthday to You.” Kennedy and Callas were allegedly having an affair at the time—an affair that would last from their first meeting in 1957 until his death in 1963.

In this one scene, Kennedy’s character becomes a “mirror,” Phillipson says, for Maria. Their moment together is really about exploring “the freedom that comes from being a living icon—and also the gilded cage it can be, too.”

This sixth iteration of JFK has been particularly meaningful—after all, in Maria, he is reunited with Larraín, the director who first cast him as JFK in Jackie. “He’s fantastic to work with. I mean, just amazing. As was Angelina, of course,” he says. And is his latest JFK at all linked to that first JFK he played all of those years ago? “I’d say definitely, just because of Pablo’s magical touch, they are connected.”

Despite having played JFK six times, he has never been the focus of any project—Caspar Phillipson’s biopic of the president has never been made. “I still haven’t done the exhaustive portrait of John F Kennedy. Who knows whether it will ever happen,” he says.

Then again, Phillipson wonders whether a traditional biopic really would be the best way to paint a true picture of the paradoxical nature of JFK after all. “Jack Kennedy is a hugely enigmatic person in himself. There can never be an exhaustive film about every aspect of his life — he was so full of contradictory things going on inside of him.”

Perhaps Phillipson’s varied portrayals, fictionalized and subjective as they may be, really do provide the impressionistic portrait we need to get the full picture of the man and his legacy in the cultural imagination. “By now I have him together with all sorts of interesting people. We could edit all that together and have a film in the end.” And Phillipson is “absolutely not” tired of portraying other people’s perceptions of the legendary man just yet. As he happily puts it, “I can’t imagine that ever not being interesting.”