Brother, Father, Politician, Martyr

Before he was cast as Robert F. Kennedy in the FX movie “RFK,” premiering Sunday night at 8, British actor Linus Roache knew very little about the slain U.S. senator from New York.

“I was 4 years old when he was killed,” says Roache (“Wings of the Dove”). “It was very interesting speaking to my peers and people of my generation--they know very little about him.”

But when Roache began his research into the third son in the Kennedy clan, he immediately felt a strong connection, one he didn’t completely understand. “It’s part of the whole Bobby Kennedy thing,” he explains, “in terms of: Why did everybody feel so connected to this man?

“My feeling is that he was a very real human being,” the actor adds. “He went through this extraordinary change and came to a point in this own life where he found a conscience that was genuine and, therefore, as he spoke about very big issues, they became very real and possible. He seemed to express the fact that we can do better, that change is possible. As soon as you hear a human being speak like that, you feel this incredible connection to something that is truly possible.”

“RFK,” which was directed by Robert Dornhelm (“Sins of the Father,” “Anne Frank”) and written by Hank Steinberg (“61*”), chronicles the final five years of Kennedy’s life, from the assassination of his brother, President John F. Kennedy, in November 1963, to his own assassination in the kitchen of L.A.’s Ambassador Hotel in June 1968.

The story focuses on Kennedy’s personal transformation from a pit bull of an attorney general during his brother’s administration to the controversial and passionate presidential candidate. The film also explores Kennedy’s underdog status in his own family and his guilt and pain over the loss of his brother.

James Cromwell portrays President Lyndon Johnson, with whom Kennedy had an adversarial relationship; David Paymer is Kennedy staffer and friend Dick Goodwin; and Martin Donovan is the ghost of JFK.

Steinberg says one of the biggest challenges writing an historical project like “RFK” is not to get bogged down in events.

“It is incredible to me that anyone would endeavor to tell the RFK story from birth to death. You couldn’t do that in two hours. Even in those five years, there was an incredible amount of just very, very dramatic things that happened that you didn’t have time for. So you just had to get down to the emotional essence.”

The first idea Steinberg came up with was having Kennedy carry on an inner dialogue with the ghost of his late brother. “It was executive producer Robert Cooper’s idea to tell the RFK story between the time that Jack died and the time Bobby died and to talk about that transformation,” he says. “As I was doing the research and thinking about the fact that you have someone who is haunted by the death of his brother and the brother had such a powerful influence on him, it just seemed to me to be a great way to show he was haunted by his brother. All that family stuff in the movies makes it like a Shakespearean tragedy. If you look at Shakespeare, it is all about these dysfunctional families and brothers and fathers.”

Roache says he had a hard time separating himself from RFK as the production wound down, “because I had been living with him” for so long. The final scene shot in the movie was the assassination sequence. “It was a real letting go. We literally moved piece by piece from the ballroom into the first section of the kitchen, down the corridor onto the kitchen floor. It was then just a close-up on Bobby. We were doing it just after midnight, the same time that it happened.”

“RFK” can be seen Sunday at 8 and 10 p.m. on FX. The movie has been rated TV-PG (may not be suitable for younger children).