Elijah Wood and Lindsay Lohan play William and Diane, a couple of high school friends present at the Ambassador Hotel on the day Robert F Kennedy was assassinated, in Emilio Estevez’ dramatic film, Bobby. Estevez’ movie focuses on 22 people who were at the Ambassador Hotel for various reasons on the day Kennedy was murdered by Sirhan Sirhan.
Lohan's character Diane is based on a woman Estevez met while pounding out the script for Bobby. Suffering from a case of writer's block, Estevez checked himself into a hotel on the coast in Central California. The desk clerk at the hotel recognized him, asked him what he was working on, and then proceeded to tell him she was a Kennedy volunteer who was at the Ambassador hotel on June 4, 1968. Estevez turned her personal story into the character played by Lohan, a young woman who marries a friend from high school to keep him out of Vietnam.
Neither Wood nor Lohan were around in the 1960s and both had to rely on Estevez and their own family members to help them get into their characters. “Emilio played a lot of Bobby Kennedy's speech throughout the film and we have that there,” explained Lohan. “I spoke to my grandmother, but I didn't know half of the things that I know now.”
Wood added, “I also watched a lot of documentaries as well. Emilio was really forthcoming to the cast with documentary material, [including] the speech from the ballroom that night, just to kind of familiarize [ourselves] with the legacy of who this man was and what the event was, to really get into the mind space of that time. It was very valuable.”
The cast for Bobby reads like a Who’s Who of Hollywood. Anthony Hopkins, Laurence Fishburne, Demi Moore, Sharon Stone, Ashton Kutcher, Martin Sheen, and William H Macy are just a handful of the actors who took little or no money to be a part of a film that meant the world to writer/director Estevez. Wood says his attraction to the project was due to Estevez’ passion for the story and the man at the heart of the film – Robert F Kennedy. “It was a little bit of both,” said Wood. “When you say it was Bobby’s words and Bobby’s influence that made me want to be a part of it, but it’s ultimately meeting that man, Emilio, and sitting down and talking to him for two hours about the movie that he wanted to make and his passion for it and how he had already been on a couple year journey to get this thing to the screen, that really made me want to be a part of it as well.”
Lohan did it because of Estevez and Kennedy, but also as a way of introducing her young fan base to an important event in American history. “It was also nice for me to have an opportunity to kind of take on the role of someone who, for my generation, for the young girls that I accumulated, I can kind of put a message into awareness out there to what’s going on in the character. My sister I actually brought to the set… She didn’t know who Bobby Kennedy was and she learned so much from being there. She went home and she did say stuff to her friends, and I think it’s important.”
Lohan’s sister, who will be 13 in December, is close in age to a lot of Lohan’s fans. If her sister and other fans understand the message and learn from the film, then Lohan feels she’s done something worthwhile. Lohan said, “I think it’s important for me to use my celebrity status or what it’s become, in a positive way, whether it’s through characters or through being with a cast of amazing people that I learned from and just putting it out there.”
Being on the set of Bobby and having the opportunity to work with such an eclectic group of actors made an impression on Lohan, but Lohan says it was Sharon Stone who really inspired her. “She’s someone that I look up to in terms of what you do for other people in the world. [She] brings a lot of awareness to that. I have more to learn from her than she does from me in the sense that I just really respect her. [She] held my hand in the scenes and I remember grabbing [her] when I was nervous about one of the speeches I had to make. We both started to cry in the scene and it was nice to work with someone who I didn’t feel like I had to act. I didn’t feel like I had to do anything really. It just kind of happened.”
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Bobby was written and directed by Emilio Estevez and is rated R for language, drug content, and a scene of violence. Bobby opens in select theaters November 17, 2006.
