Manhunt
The final episode of historical miniseries Manhunt is now available to stream on Apple TV+.
The search for Lincoln’s murderer, John Wilkes Booth, portrayed by Anthony Boyle, reached a peak in episode 6, when Booth and his accomplice, David (Will Harrison) found themselves trapped in a barn surrounded by soldiers. As he was surrounding himself, Booth was shot in the head, which put an end to the intense and breathless 12-day chase.
The season finale focuses on the trial of Booth’s accomplices. Most of them were sentenced to death, as Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, played by Tobias Menzies, had gathered as much evidence as possible. His goal was also to prove a grand conspiracy against Lincoln, but his efforts were in vain.
However, with the arrival of President Andrew Johnson, Stanton was going to be removed from his position as Secretary of War and any chance to continue Lincoln’s Reconstruction efforts in the South would have been lost. In the final episode, we can see Stanton barricading himself in the war department for weeks, to protest against Johnson’s cabinet.
Throughout the show, the recurring theme of hands is very much associated with Booth. Indeed, the first time the audience meets him is through his hands, as the camera focuses on his nails, on the back of his hands, while he is getting ready to assassinate President Lincoln. “My mother believed that God gave me these hands for a reason, to do something important” declares Booth in a brilliantly-written monologue.
“Thank you for noticing that, I really appreciate it,” showrunner Monica Beletsky told me during an interview. She added: “Part of that came from real things Booth said in his diary. I thought it was interesting, this dichotomy between his mum saying that he is going to do great things with his hands, and the soothsayer who said ‘No, you are going to die early’. So these two ideas being at war with how he saw himself, that was all really interesting psychology to me. In my writer’s room, it was suggested that we set up the hands early, so I came up with the idea to do that in the early shots so it would pay off later. And that monologue I wrote about his hands, was really when Anthony told me that he knew he had to do the role, so I am very proud of that, and I’m happy you noticed the details.”
Anthony Boyle as John Wilkes Booth in Manhunt
I asked Anthony Boyle if knowing how his hands were going to be filmed, as well as the physicality of his character helped him bring Booth to the screen.
Boyle said, “It was interesting the whole hands thing, it is really something that from the start, I really wanted to think about, to grow his nails, how he manicured himself, and to feel sort of very proud of his hands, that informed his physicality. This guy is a real narcissist, he thinks he has special hands, like it’s such a crazy thing to think. I began to sort of look at my hands, look at my veins, and just started to think about how Booth would have thought of his own hands, his own body, his own mind, his sense of self and who he was in the world. That he was more than just flesh and blood, that he was, you know, some sort of special entity.”
So, in a show about politic, insurrectionists, betrayals and secrets, and set during one of the most tragic events in American history, what would be one scene the actors wish they could have witnessed in order to get a better understanding of their characters ?
Boyle said, “I would have liked to have been there in the barn, it would be really interesting to see the conversation between him and Will’s character and see how hard he went down. They say his last words were ‘Don’t look at my hands’. Now I don’t know if it was American propaganda or if he really said that at the time. But it would have been interesting to see what really happened.”
Tobias Menzies as Edwin Stanton in Manhunt
Hamish Linklater, who portrays Lincoln in the show, said, “I love how much Lincoln loved Shakespeare. It was something that Monica and I talked about and she put a couple of extra Shakespeare lines in there. The question I would like to ask him is ‘What part do you wish you could have played if you had been an actor instead of a “Railsplitter”’? If he could fill the fields of Gettysburg, imagine what he could have done in a regular theatre.”
Linklater added that he did not want to let Lincoln down, because of how much he loved him. His goal was “to portray him in such a way that people would want to lean into what he said and what he stood for.”
Patton Oswalt, who plays the role of Lafayette Baker, said he wished he could have witnessed how Lincoln was able to bring people together. He said, “He was asking for such a shit forward in consciousness and politics, and how he must have been able to articulate that to other people and have people agree and move forward with him, that must have been some statesmanship that I can’t even imagine,” He added: “A lot of people were his former rivals, but he was able to see beyond that, and see in the near and far future, who could help him get the things he needed to move forward. That must have been brilliant to watch.”
Tobias Menzies also explained how he got into the role, how he found Stanton in him, and if the physical elements that helped Boyle for Booth, also applied to Stanton, who suffered from severe asthma and made it very challenging for him to be physically involved in the arrest of Booth.
Menzies said, “If I am totally honest, I know a lot of people talk about being in and out of characters, that’s not quite my experience of acting. For me, it’s a process of building up certain ingredients, and trusting that if you put these things in place, hopefully the audience will experience something that is complete and authentic. So it’s the sort of mystical idea of people saying that they feel the character, or they don’t feel it at another moment, that’s not something I think about. I always try to be as specific as I can, and build up the physical aspect.”
However, Lovie Simone, who portrays Mary Simms, one of the 10 black witnesses who testified during the trial, had very little information on her character. At the end of the show, we see Mary attending university, but we still have no idea if Mary finally became a teacher after that.
Simone said, ‘’So little was known on any black life in the past, this is kind of a new thing, so we had to use what we found, and also use humanity, because back then, white people spent their entire lives trying to erase the humanity of black people. So adding that, with the little bit that I knew to make a full person was what I had to do with Mary. I really wish that life for them was documented, because then we could have found this out.’’
Lovie Simone as Mary Simms in Manhunt
Lincoln had told Stanton to lead Reconstruction “Through the final act.’’ However, at the end of the final episode, Stanton is weakened and exhausted by his asthma and declares, “We finish the work now, we have too.’’
He stands up, immediately collapses and dies in his home, on Christmas Eve.
Menzies said, “Democracy is more under strain, and maybe it has been for a long time. There’s a very potentially consequential election coming up in November. So, to look back at a moment in the past where the Union has been gravely threatened, and it was certainly true in the immediate aftermath of Lincoln’s assassination, it’s interesting to retell those stories. It’s not a static state, democracy, it has to be continually maintained.”
