Inside Jason Beghe's Friendship With JFK Jr.

With his deep voice and enigmatic persona, Jason Beghe seamlessly slipped into the role of troubled detective sergeant Hank Voight when he joined NBC's "Chicago P.D." back in 2014 — and maybe he has his family history to thank for it. The actor comes from a long line of ancestors who were active in the judicial and political systems of, yes, Chicago. According to the Chicago Tribune, Beghe is the great-grandson of Charles S. Deneen, a district attorney who became the first two-term governor of Illinois. Beghe is also the son of Illinois native Renato Beghe, who was appointed judge of the U.S. Tax Court in 1991 by then-President George H.W. Bush, according to The Washington Post. "It seemed something almost destined in a way," he said of working in the Windy City in the Chicago Tribune interview.

Beghe's education and upbringing matched the status of his well-connected family. Despite his "deep, deep, deep roots" in Illinois, as he told the Chicago Tribune, Beghe is actually a New Yorker. Beghe attended the Collegiate School, a private institution that has been educating the sons of New York's elite since 1628, per its website. With that kind of history behind his school, it is unsurprising that Beghe met some pretty influential people early on in life. "You have no idea the friends I had!" he told the Daily Beast. Maybe we don't, but we do know he was BFFs with John F. Kennedy Jr.

After meeting as young children at the Collegiate School, Jason Beghe and John F. Kennedy Jr. struck up a strong bond. "I was very close with John. His mother took me to Europe my first time," Beghe told the Daily Beast, referring of course to Jackie Kennedy Onassis. According to C. David Heymann, author of the 2007 biography "American Legacy: The Story of John and Caroline Kennedy," Beghe convinced Kennedy, who was a good impersonator, to join the school's program with him. "Both boys entertained their classmates with hilarious imitations of their favorite entertainers," Heymann wrote. 

In 1999, following Kennedy's tragic death, Beghe told CNN they liked to spend time together outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art. "We used to hang out there for hours outside at night," Beghe said. According to Heymann, that's where Kennedy and Beghe "hatch[ed] their future plans to become stars of the stage and screen." Sometimes, they and their friends walked to Central Park for a change of scenery. "Just regular stuff," he told CNN of the things they did together. "Some good, some naughty." 

As much as Kennedy liked to live a normal life, he was still the son of a former president and thus had a Secret Service detail nearby at all times. But they were cool, Beghe ensured. "They respected our desire to be independent and if we did something naughty like puff on a cigarette ... they wouldn't rat on us," he told CNN.

John F. Kennedy wasn't the only prominent friend Jason Beghe made at the Collegiate School. While not famous at the time, David Duchovny was also among Beghe's close circle. "David and I have been best friends since ninth grade. When we get together, we talk about high school highjinks. We never talk about careers," Beghe told the Sioux City Journal in 2014. Like he did with Kennedy, Beghe also successfully persuaded Duchovny to join the school's theater program, even though Duchovny had previously shown no interest in acting, according to The Daily Progress.

While their bond remained strong, Beghe distanced himself from Duchovny when he joined the Church of Scientology in 1994, according to the Daily Beast. That's because the church deemed Duchovny a "suppressive person," or SP, a term used by the church to refer to those it believes work against its ideologies, the report detailed. "Scientology affected our relationship in that we didn't get to enjoy each other as much as we could have," Beghe told the outlet. 

Duchovny didn't try to close the gap because he felt Beghe was different. "The way he described the world and his experiences, particularly his psychological experiences, was cult-ish and had changed completely," he told the Daily Beast in a separate interview. The old friends reconnected when Beghe left the church in the mid-2000s. "After having gone through that, our reunion was that much better," Beghe said.