“Everything could've been lost, and it wasn't, because of the people who were there at that time,” said actor Hamish Linklater about Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, an effort to change the events of the Civil War. That moment is the focal point of Manhunt, a new Apple TV+ series based on James L. Swanson’s award-winning novel of the same name. Linklater plays Lincoln in the series, a role primarily seen through flashbacks as investigators search for the president’s assassin, and he was joined by his costars at the TCA Winter Press Tour. “The brilliant thing that Monica [Beletsky, showrunner] has done is she has turned this moment into such a nail-biting focal point of our history. She’s made a thriller about the 14th Amendment.”
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“When the audition came through, I started looking at all these documentaries written about him and all these books,” Irish actor Anthony Boyle said about his preparations to play Lincoln’s killer, John Wilkes Booth. Prior to the audition, Boyle’s knowledge of Booth was limited to a joke in an old episode of The Simpsons. “What I really wanted was to get to the bare bones of him. So I got his letters. I had all these letters that he had sent when he was 15 to 26. And when he starts off at 15, he's rambunctious. He's going to fairs, he's mooning people, he was a bit of a wayward lad. Then at about 19, he starts writing things like, ‘Someone insulted my sister, so I put a stick over his head and watched him bleed.’ And then by the time he's 25, he's writing things like ‘The Black man is enslaving the White man in America.’ Through these letters, you’ve got this descent into this madness, into this racist ideology.”
“There was more on the horse than the life of Mary Simms,” explained Lovie Simone, who plays a key witness to the events, one whose story wasn’t taken with credibility because of her race and gender. “That is very telling of the times, about how much of a human she actually was. So, there wasn't much to go off of like with the Booths' letters. It was more so me tapping into an oppression that has been going on for a very long time, and what that would look like, at its source, rather than, what its descendants look like. It was a lot of going back to what the dynamics were like socially back then, that did help me understand how to interact with Mudd or Stanton. It was very empowering as well because even though there wasn't that much, it is beautiful to be able to tap into somebody that existed before and to tell their story because it wasn't told.”
“I was fortunate to find letters that Dr. Mudd had written as a way into the character,” Matt Walsh revealed. “I stumbled upon something that Dr. Mudd was trying to cancel a subscription to a Christian magazine because they had changed their position on slavery, and said that ‘We no longer feel it's what Jesus would want.’ He kept trying to cancel it, and they kept sending it to him, which was slightly comic. He ultimately wrote a letter saying, ‘I find it ridiculous that you think that you know what Jesus' opinion on slavery would be, in that he lived in a time of slavery, and never spoke one word about it.’ I thought that sort of religious entitlement from a holy person, or holy man, so he thought, was a great way in to that character.”
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“I started out basically wondering if my character was even real,” joked Brandon Flynn, who plays Edwin Stanton Jr., the adult son of Lincoln’s Secretary of War. “Every time I looked up my character, it was just all my father's information, which actually became the core of who I was playing. I'm always living in this man's name, in this man's shadow. Of course, the most interesting piece that I discovered through some research and then through Monica's scripts was that I had had a brother… The sort of dynamic of the intimate household where a child has been lost, and what that looks like. And am I in that guy's footsteps? Am I in my father's footsteps? Just sort of constantly navigating that dramaturgy.”
“These people knew each other very well, and they were then thrown into a situation which they could not have imagined,” added Tobias Menzies, who plays Edwin Stanton, organizer of the hunt for Lincoln’s killer. “The photographs we have of Stanton are very whiskery, and so we obviously took some license with that,” he shared about not being a physical match for his character. “I think the really important thing is that people understand and feel their dilemmas and their loss and the challenges that are facing these characters in this very pressurized political thriller. Through that, you can then get closer to them and to their lives.”
Series creator, showrunner, writer, and executive producer Monica Beletsky set the precedent for the cast to delve deep into the research process. A lot of care went into depicting this period accurately, and one of the stories she wanted to serve justice to was that of Lincoln’s widow, Mary Todd Lincoln. “In some ways the assassination and Mary Lincoln have almost become a little bit of a joke,” Monica explained. “Everybody says, ‘Oh, Mrs. Lincoln, but how did you like the play?’ But, really, if you're inside what's happening, it's such a tragic situation. I felt that she's been mischaracterized, and I don't actually believe that she was mentally ill. If you see the context of the fact that she lost two children, and then her husband, and how vulnerable she was once Lincoln was assassinated. She was penniless, she didn't have any way to earn money, she was homeless all of a sudden. I really wanted to draw her in a way that saw her in a light now of how we might perceive a woman who had lost two children and a husband. I also felt that Lincoln kept her very close intellectually from what I read, so I thought it was important to show how much in their marriage her thoughts were important to him.”
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The search is on for John Wilkes Booth in Manhunt. The first 3 episodes are now available to stream on Apple TV+, with additional episodes released on Fridays.
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