The 50th anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination is coming up with much fanfare. There are specials on just about every news channel that are being billed as the one to watch. However, one that stands out is “Killing Kennedy”, which is not going to air on a news channel, but on the National Geographic channel.

The cast can’t be beat, with the adorable Rob Lowe playing John F. Kennedy, and Ginnifer Goodwin as Jackie. But the role that stands out in this show is Michelle Trachtenberg as the elusive Marina Oswald, in a character that normally hides in the shadows of this story. Trachtenberg hopes to shed new light on Marina as a wife and mother living in that era, according to E!.

“She was demonized for being married to at the time the world’s greatest villain, the core of evil and she was just a woman who loved her husband,” she says. “To this day, from everything that I’ve read about Marina, she has always thought that Lee was innocent. So as an actress, I had to go about playing her and thinking, ‘OK, my husband is innocent. I believe this.'”

Also, surprisingly, she didn’t have to learn Russian to play Marina Oswald. She already knew it! How many actresses can you say that about?

“I’ve always dreamed of doing a role and speaking Russian. I am fluent in Russian but to change the way that you speak to reflect a housewife in the late ’50s and ’60s is already an adjustment. And then when you’re putting in the Russian, everything is an extra thought,” she says.

The story is done with the lives of John F. Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald careening toward each other in parallel. The life of JFK will be shown, infidelity and all, accurately with the marital and political struggles he faced leading up to his encounter with Oswald on that fateful day, November 22, 1963.

Rob Lowe puts it well, “The question is why do we need another Kennedy movie? The answer is because of the brilliant construct of the way this story is told of taking Lee Harvey Oswald and JFK at the same moment in time in 1960… These parallel lives meeting like Titanic meets the iceberg, you know it’s coming.”

“Killing Kennedy” airs Sunday night on the National Geographic channel.

Image via youtube