Actor Brett Stimely has portrayed the slain president four times on screen, including in Parkland — which arrives on DVD today and recounts that fateful day 50 years ago in Dallas. He talks to BuzzFeed about why he’s constantly channeling Jack Kennedy.
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It is one of the most iconic moments of the 20th century, and one that imprinted itself on the minds of an entire generation. In 1963, on a late November day, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated as he rode in an open motorcade through Dallas' Dealey Plaza. His wife Jacqueline, her pristine pink suit spattered with the blood of the young president, wrapped her arms around her dying husband in a desperate attempt to save him.
But Kennedy didn't die in that car: He was rushed to Parkland Hospital in Dallas, where a team of physicians frantically attempted to keep Kennedy alive.
Parkland, which arrived in theaters in early October and is available on DVD today, is based on the actual events of what happened after the fatal shot was fired 50 years ago. The film centers on the lives of those everyday people most affected by the incident — the medical team that tried in vain to save him, the bystander (played by Paul Giamati) who accidently caught the assassination on camera, and the family members of assassin Lee Harvey Oswald.
The film's most crucial role is that of Kennedy himself, played by actor Brett Stimely, who is little more than a corpse being poked and prodded on a gurney table. "We're the same height, we have a similar bone structure and similar eyes, and if I put my hair the right way it looks similar to his," said Stimely, sipping an iced tea at Hollywood's Chateau Marmont. Stimely, a Washington state native, grew up idolizing the man he would come to personify not once, but four times on screen. "I always admired him," he said simply, "he was always my favorite president."
But Parkland isn't about Kennedy, according to Stimely. "You're focused on the reaction of these people as it happens," he said. "There's a wonderful picture that Colin Hanks [who plays Dr. Malcolm Perry] sent to Tom [Hanks], his father, where two doctors — Colin and Zac Efron, and a few others — are all gathered around me, and Colin has his finger stuck in my trachea, with blood all over," Stimely said. "He got a text back from Tom saying 'ick.'"
Because the majority of Parkland is set inside the hospital operating room, with a team of medical experts elbow deep in the insides of the President, Stimely was outfitted with a variety of prosthetics. "There was so much blood," he said. "I had a wig on, and my wig had a big 14-centimeter flap open, with bananas and yogurt and fake blood coming out — that was our brain matter. There were two tubes up my back and into where the flap was, and they were in the other room oozing blood so it was dripping all over and going into the kick bucket… Quite fun."
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Stimely's job on Parkland involved laying lifeless on a table, but he said that the gig wasn't all that easy. "I had to be naked for many days, laying on the cold slab, for eight or nine hours. I got up once for lunch during the day, but when they called cut or did a break or something, I had to lie there. The continuity wouldn't be able to be matched, so I had to stay all hooked up. No toilet breaks."
Historical accuracy was paramount to the film's producers, because, as Stimely put it, "You want to be absolutely accurate because it's the first time you're telling the story of these people." To this end, Stimely wore contacts to make his eyes appear dilated to different sizes. "I didn't know this, but when you look at pictures of Kennedy when he died, his eyes were open, and they were open until they put him in the coffin," he said. "I had to have my eyes open for 12 days. There were bets going on for days about when I was going to blink. You hold it, you just don't. In between each take I got eye drops, so that kept the burning down a little bit. Technically [Kennedy] was alive for 35 minutes before they called it."
In one particularly memorable scene, in a last minute attempt to save the President, two doctors take turns delivering compressions to Kennedy's now lifeless body. But as the scene builds, so does the severity of compressions delivered. "Yes, It hurt," Stimely confirmed. "One day we had a big prosthetic piece that was a mold of my chest, so when Colin was giving me chest compressions, it was great. But then Zac [Efron] took over, which was the next day, and there was no chest piece. So he starts doing it and I go, 'AH!' and he said, 'Dude, did I hurt you?' He had to make it look real, so I was getting a pounding. I couldn't scream, I couldn't punch him — I wanted to punch him."
