He might be playing history’s most charismatic president but, as James Marsden tells Susan Griffin, thanks to a little help from his dad there was no reason to sweat it
Being tasked with playing President John F Kennedy on the big screen was always going to be a challenge – not least because the film’s release coincides with the 50th anniversary of the American President’s assassination. But James Marsden wasn’t going to turn the chance down.

“I try not to let fear dictate which roles I’m going to do,” says the 40-year-old, who’s starred in a diverse array of projects from Ally McBeal and the X-Men action films to musicals Enchanted and Hairspray, and romcoms like 27 Dresses.

“To be honest, I’ve always been a pretty decent mimic, yet the pitfall for me was not to go in and be a JFK impersonator. No one wants to see that,” says the Oklahoma-born actor, on playing one half of America’s most documented couple.

“We all know what he and Jackie looked like and how they spoke, so that was a little daunting because everyone’s going to have their own expectations, but you have to do your own thing.”

The film, starring Forest Whitaker as the protagonist Cecil Gaines and Oprah Winfrey as his wife Gloria, is directed by Lee Daniels, who helmed 2009’s harrowing Precious.

It's based on an interview which Washington Post writer Wil Haygood did with 89-year-old Eugene Allen in 2008.

In the weeks leading up to the historic election of Barack Obama, Haygood made it his mission to find an African American who had worked in the White House and witnessed the Civil Rights movement from behind the scenes. After countless phone calls, he came across Allen, a man who served under eight presidents.

Though Marsden wasn’t conscious of the interview before he was offered the role, he quickly made himself aware of it, and thought it was ‘an intriguing story’.

He was only given two weeks to prepare but, fortunately, his father’s a Kennedy buff.

“He was very excited to hear that I was doing this,” says Marsden, who credits his dad for calming his nerves. “I was like, I’m too young for this’ and he said, ‘No, you’re perfect – Kennedy might have been a few years older than you, but to the rest of the people in office, he was a kid’.”

When Daniels set him a ‘homework assignment’ to find out something about JFK that very few people know, it was his father he looked to.

“He remembers reading that Jackie bought him an expensive Italian sports car and, behind her back, he had it returned,” says Marsden. “He was a man of the people, and never wanted to appear as if he had more than your average person.”

Marsden also has his father, a microbiologist for Canada State University, to thank for allowing him to pursue a career in acting in the first place, by financing him for a year.

“I was really surprised how supportive he and my mother were,” recalls the star.