Jessica Kensky and her husband Patrick Downes, survivors of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, sat down with The Daily Free Press in a roundtable interview following a press conference last week for the upcoming film “Patriots Day.”
Kensky and Downes said they wanted to make sure that by giving their testimony to the filmmakers, the right story would be told.
“Our story is a story of many people,” Downes said. “We can’t just pretend that we can just tell our story and not have it affect all of these people who we care about, so we had this very real concern that this story would be respectful of them, respectful of the people who were killed and their families and respectful for all the people who were injured.”
Downes said Boston responded immediately to the bombing, and until this day, he can still feel the support from the community.
“Jess and I have memories of being in our hospital beds and hearing about how the community was coalescing behind us,” Downes said. “That didn’t end in that first week. That’s continued to today, and I know it will continue for many years to come, and that’s something really special.”
During the press conference, most of the panelists praised the accuracy of the film. Former Boston Police Commissioner Edward Davis, who served from December 2006 to October 2013, said the filmmakers got it right.
“I think they nailed it,” Davis said. “They squeezed an enormous amount of detail into two hours.”
Kensky said the characters who portrayed her and Downes wore the same clothes they were wearing on April 15, 2013.
“Rachel Brosnahan had on my jewelry that I actually wore that day at the bombing,” Kensky said. “So there was a lot of ways that they made that extra effort to really make it authentic.”
Others on the panel also commented on the city’s reaction to the disaster. Mark Wahlberg, who starred in the film as Sgt. Tommy Saunders, said he is proud of the way that Boston citizens and officials responded to the bombing.
“I knew the reaction would be emotional, and I’m just very proud to be a part of it,” he said.
A central message in the film and from the conference was that the story is really about everyone involved, most importantly the survivors.
Richard DesLauriers, former Boston FBI special agent in charge, said he met with many of the survivors in the following weeks of the bombing and was “amazed by their strength and fortitude.”
“None of them were bitter,” DesLauriers said. “None of them were angry. It was one of the broadest displays of strength, perseverance and human spirit I have ever seen.”
Another topic of discussion was the screen time for the Tsarnaev brothers, the convicted bombers of the Boston Marathon bombing. The film’s director, Peter Berg, said the team was careful about how to depict the two terrorists.
“We were very conscious of not wanting to portray them in any way to be righteous men,” Berg said. “We don’t consider their behavior to be righteous. We don’t consider them to be good Muslims. We don’t really actually consider them to be Muslims at all.”
Downes said the film is an opportunity for people to really think about what is happening around the world.
“Bombs are going off in people’s communities, and people are being killed and maimed,” he said. “If we’re going to maintain societies that are peaceful and communal, we have to find some way to approach it. We don’t know what all those answers are, but we have to at least continue to talk about it.”
As for now, Downes and Kensky are focusing on moving on from this experience. Kensky said she wants something normal again.
“I want to be anonymous and a nurse again,” Kensky said. “I want to wear scrub pants and no one to know any of this. If I get attention at that point, I would like it to be for something I’m doing professionally or personally and not because of what happened.”
Downes ran in the Boston Marathon in 2016.
“I kept thinking about how special it would be to run that day, and hopefully what it would mean for other people that it would be a sign of how much their investment in us paid off — that we would be healthy again,” Downes said. “I didn’t think it would ever be possible, but then it just sort of happened, and it felt so special to be a part of it.”
“Patriots Day” opens in several Boston-area theaters on Wednesday. It opens nationwide on Jan. 13.
