The Big Picture

James L. Swanson’s bestselling book
Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer
had many potential avenues for adaptation, but none came to fruition before showrunner Monica Beletsky brought her pitch to Apple.
Apple TV+’s
Manhunt
, which stars Tobias Menzies, Anthony Boyle, and Hamish Linklater, revolves around the real-life chase for Lincoln’s assassin.
Beletsky speaks about assembling the show’s cast, telling this historical event in a unique and character-driven way, and painting a more intimate portrait of Lincoln.

Apple TV+’s Manhunt, which is finally set to premiere this week, has had a long journey to becoming a reality. Long before creator and showrunner Monica Beletsky (Fargo, The Leftovers) brought her pitch to Apple, the concept of a show around the hunt for Lincoln’s assassin had been gestating in Hollywood in some form for years. The anticipation surrounding author James L. Swanson’s eventual-bestselling novel had reached a level where the adaptation rights were being bid on before the book had even been published. Early on, in 2002, it was set to be a film with Harrison Ford in the lead. By 2008, more reports surfaced that David Simon and Tom Fontana were interested in turning Manhunt into a TV series for HBO.

Neither of those projects ever came to fruition, and it wasn’t until 2020 that Beletsky, unaware of any other adaptation attempts, approached Apple TV+ with her own idea for what she describes to Collider as a “detective cat-and-mouse thriller about the investigation” into the Lincoln assassination. At that point, Swanson’s 2007 book, Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer, from which the show takes its name, was brought to her attention — but the upcoming series builds even more characters into its narrative than the book. In fact, Beletsky considered Swanson’s book “a great resource” for getting the details of the assassination night right, but she knew she wanted to explore the hunt for Booth through one man’s eyes first and foremost: Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, played by Tobias Menzies (Outlander, Game of Thrones).

It’s through Stanton’s perspective that we get a more intimate look at Abraham Lincoln (Midnight Mass’s Hamish Linklater), arguably more so than other adaptations of this time, as well as understand why the chase for the President’s killer holds such personal weight. We’re also privy to the inner workings of the man who pulled the trigger that night: John Wilkes Booth, played by Anthony Boyle (Masters of the Air). As the two historical figures find themselves on an inevitable collision course, Stanton’s pursuit of Booth also forces him to question just how much of himself he’s willing to devote to securing the future that Lincoln essentially gave his life for.

Ahead of Manhunt’s premiere on Apple TV+, Collider had the opportunity to speak with Beletsky about the long journey to adapting the conspiracy thriller miniseries. Over the course of the interview, which you can read below, the creator, showrunner, and writer discusses why this particular moment in history was so appealing for an adaptation, finding her lead in Tobias Menzies, and the brand-new song from Danielle Ponder that debuts over the show’s opening credits. She also delves into finding the balance with Hamish Linklater’s prosthetic work for Lincoln, why casting decisions like Patton Oswalt and Matt Walsh aren’t such a surprise when referring to the real historical figures, why it was so important to tell Mary Simms’ story, and so much more.

Manhunt (2024) The aftermath of the first American presidential assassination and the fight to preserve and protect the ideals that were the foundation of Lincoln’s Reconstruction plans.Release Date March 15, 2024 Cast Tobias Menzies , Anthony Boyle , Lovie Simone , Matt Walsh , Brandon Flynn , Betty Gabriel , Will Harrison , Hamish Linklater , Damian O’Hare , Patton Oswalt , Lili Taylor Seasons 1 Creator(s) Monica Beletsky Writers Monica Beletsky Showrunner Monica Beletsky

COLLIDER: This is a project that was being developed in some form for a long time. At one point, there were talks of doing a movie; at one point, HBO was in the conversation. Later on, you had an independent idea, for a show more centered on Stanton and that character. Do you remember when that idea started forming for you into a show that you knew you wanted to make?

MONICA BELETSKY: It was in 2020. I brought the idea to Apple that early winter or spring, and I had no idea about the previous development. I wasn’t considering the book or looking at the book, I just had an idea to do a detective cat-and-mouse thriller about the investigation. It was brought to my attention that the book existed, so it was very lucky timing that the book became available shortly before they got excited about my idea.

How much did the book lend itself to the idea that you already had for this investigative thriller?

BELETSKY: The book is a great resource for the assassination night, which is a lot of the pilot, and for Booth’s odyssey along the way, his escape as well as the cavalry who are looking for him. What I brought to it was the conspiracy angle that there might’ve been other people involved besides Booth, and that that’s largely still an unsolved crime. I think James [Swanson] would agree that I brought the Stanton point-of-view to it — that instead of seeing it through the whole cavalry’s point of view, you’re seeing it through this one man. It was also really important to me to highlight the really courageous Black witnesses at the trial, [and] telling the story of Mary Simms was very personal to me. That’s the other element that’s a departure from the book that I was really proud of.

This show is centered around a very interesting point in history that not a lot of other adaptations have focused on, which is the investigation in the wake of the assassination. Was that one of the biggest appeals for you?

BELETSKY: Yes, absolutely. Because as much as it’s not purely a history show, I’m a huge history buff. To find a moment in history that’s still so relevant, that is still sort of affecting all of our lives, but is also a really propulsive and thrilling story that I really hadn’t seen, was a huge appeal for me.

What was it about Tobias Menzies that, in terms of trying to find somebody to sort of anchor a show around, just made him stand out in that way?

BELETSKY: I was really excited to write a role that had all of my favorite attributes for a leading role in a series, and Stanton gave me the opportunity to write a workplace story and a family story. He’s also this guy who was behind the curtains, running the Civil War. He was supporting the lead role, and that seemed like a really clear parallel to Tobias. Stanton has an innate sense of justice; that’s something that I see in Tobias. He really looks for projects that he feels have meaning to them, and we have that in common. I think a lot of other actors are looking for ways to be a bad boy or have fun, and Tobias is special in that he is looking for a purpose in the role.

‘Manhunt’s Surprising Connection to ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’
Image via Apple TV+

The way Lincoln is written in this show is that it doesn’t spotlight Lincoln the speaker, Lincoln the public figure, Lincoln the icon, so much as it is Lincoln the father, Lincoln the friend. A man who has so much weight on his shoulders in the midst of a very tumultuous point in history. What made Hamish Linklater the person that you knew could take on what feels like a much more intimate portrayal of Lincoln?

BELETSKY: Hamish is an incredible actor like Tobias, and there were several things. Everything you said is what I was looking for, and that’s the conversation I had with Hamish. I really wanted to portray a domestic version of Lincoln. We do have little windows into him preparing the second inauguration speech, and so we get little pieces of the Lincoln that we are familiar with, or have been canon. But because this was about losing him and the people who were going to fight so hard to avenge his death, I felt it was really important to know him as a human being. Hamish is someone who is both so witty like Lincoln and so wonderful with words in real life, and he also has such heart and intelligence, so he just brought a lot to it that I knew would be really ideal for the role. He’s also very tall, which helps. Because Tobias is also very tall, and so to be convincing that Lincoln is taller, it really needed Hamish to be all 6’4″, because Tobias is over six feet.

It’s gotten a little lost in popular culture that this was a time when it was pre-electronic entertainment, and so people’s way with words was so important in terms of the power dynamic in conversations, in friendships, in just everyday life. Language was entertainment, in a way. I wanted to be able to also show the Lincoln who would break out into reading Shakespeare in the middle of a meeting. Hamish just seemed that he could comfortably fit in his skin in a role that had been played by so many incredible people.

There’s a bit of prosthetic work required to make Hamish Linklater look closer to Lincoln. Was that a trial-and-error process in trying to figure out how much to really put on?

BELETSKY: We actually have this incredible video where it’s all three hours of his hair and makeup getting done that I really want to put out there at some point. At first, I didn’t think we needed prosthetics at all, and everyone was like, “No, no, no, no, no, you’ve got to do a little, because everybody knows who this man looks like.” We were so lucky that our makeup department brought on Vincent [Van Dyke], who also did Leo DiCaprio on Killers of the Flower Moon, and he’s just phenomenal.

Vincent would show us stuff, and then Carl [Franklin] and I told Vincent what we thought the most important attributes of Lincoln were that we needed to accentuate — his ears and his hairline, the angle of his nose. We were trying to go for how gaunt Lincoln was, and the more gaunt you try to make the cheeks, the more you sort of have to layer up the part of the cheek, and so it can end up making the face bigger than you want when you’re trying to go smaller. That was the main adjustment that we had to make, and around the pilot or the second episode is where I think we really honed it.

Anthony Boyle Referenced John Wilkes Booth’s Real Writings for ‘Manhunt’
Image via Apple TV

Sort of a segue into talking about Anthony Boyle as John Wilkes Booth, is he wearing any prosthetics for the character?

BELETSKY: Anthony has only a scar that we added to his cheek, because Booth had a scar, and the mustache in some of the scenes is Anthony’s own. Because we were filming out of order, we then replicated Anthony’s own mustache and added a little to it. But he actually can grow quite a mustache and was very proud of that.

What did Anthony Boyle bring to this role specifically, in terms of casting him as this very polarizing, controversial person?

BELETSKY: His passion. He brings such a passion for the role. You can see it on screen. The energy that he gives to the escape, and even just the way he pushes his calling card across the desk. He just does everything with such intention and with 100% of his commitment. It’s not his natural role, to play someone who would commit a crime like this, but there is a charisma to Booth — because he was a famous actor, because he had partly a charmed life — and Anthony has that charisma in spades. He just makes everybody laugh and feel good about being around him. [Anthony] and I would meet for a couple of hours before each script and go through it, and he did so many readings of Booth’s letters, and he would say to me, “Oh, this anecdote’s really interesting. Can you do something with that?” I would find a way to get it in the script so that he would be even more excited about the scene.

‘Manhunt’s Cast Is Made Up of Some Surprising Additions — But There’s a Reason for That
Image via Apple TV+

I feel like some people might be a little surprised by Patton [Oswalt] and Matt [Walsh], especially just because they’re both so well-known for operating in different genres and this is a different story, a different tenor for both of them to play. Were you willing to cast outside the box for both of these roles?

BELETSKY: Tonally, I don’t believe in doing things all one way. I know it’s a drama. I know it’s a thriller, but life is not all serious or all comedic. I really wanted the world to feel rich and real, and some of my tonal references, and also the work that I love the most, from the Coen Brothers to Shakespeare, there’s always lightness to give you relief from the tension, and that was my intention. There’s nothing really comedic about Matt’s role, so that one is slightly more of a departure, and we offered the role to [him]. We wanted to find someone who was really believable as the guy next door delivering babies, and who would be very hard for a jury not to side with in a trial. He just has that everyman neighborly quality that I thought would really make that role chilling.

For [Patton], the real-life Lafayette Baker was a very eccentric person, and so I wanted someone who could bring those qualities. This was somebody who was a firecracker and a bit of a loose cannon, to use some period-correct analogy. He needed to be someone who Stanton needed to rely on, but couldn’t entirely trust. I wanted to see him push Stanton’s buttons and be a really interesting foil to him. I really love their dynamic, and Patton brings a lot of honesty to the role. The real Lafayette Baker helped invent undercover spy work, and he was a pathological liar. It wasn’t like I took a super-serious role and gave it to a comedian. The role itself, in my opinion, should be somebody who operates on a different tone.

When I heard the theme song over the show’s opening credits, I immediately went to Google to look it up, discovered it was nowhere to be found, then realized it’s a brand-new song. What was the process behind picking the right song for the show?

BELETSKY: I’m so, so proud of the song. There’s sort of a trend lately of questioning whether shows even need main titles, even need theme songs. For me, it sets the tone for how to watch a show, and it was really important to me to have main titles and to have a main title song. Danielle Ponder was one of Apple’s artists to watch, and so they brought me, I want to say, a dozen names of people who are on an arc like her. I listened to all of them, and her voice just blew me away.

I wrote [Danielle] a letter, and she responded, and she took it on herself to create this new song. All I really said to her was, “I’m looking for something in the theme of perseverance.” We’ve just been through a lot as a country, and perseverance is one of the things that I love writing about most and is embodied in Stanton in the show. She had a piece of a song written, and it was about her ancestors, and she told me that when she got my prompts and the opportunity, she was able to finish the song.

Monica Beletsky Wanted ‘Manhunt’ to be a Nonlinear Story From the Beginning

The show starts with the assassination, but then there are opportunities to go back and see moments before that night throughout the rest of the episodes. Was that something you wanted to do from the beginning, jump around in the timeline and flash back to those scenes throughout?

BELETSKY: Yes, I had that as early as the pilot. I’m very interested in not just the who, what, where, when of history, but the how, and the psychology of why people believe the things they believe. Why do they do the things they do, and why do they make the decisions that they make? Flashbacks can be a sore point between writers and studios because they cost money, and they can be cut out sometimes, but I really wanted to use them to show the psychology of decision-making, and also be able to remind people of the heart and soul of who they lost in Lincoln. A lot of the main characters have flashbacks in the show, and that’s to give the audience an idea of what they’ve been through and why they’re doing the things they do. Why does Herold go along with Booth, and why does Mary Simms not turn in Dr. Mudd at first? These were things that I wanted to shed light on so that we could have a more literary and richer understanding of the characters in the present.

The flashbacks, as well as Lovie Simone’s performance, really do so much in explaining the significance that Mary Simms has in the story, and why she’s such a pivotal figure later on. What fueled the decision to spotlight her, figure out what you wanted to highlight about her arc, and weave her into this story?

BELETSKY: She’s introduced in the pilot, and then she becomes much more important to the story. I found her as just a footnote in the trial transcript. There’s a list with the ages of the Black witnesses at the trial, and there were only a handful of witnesses, I think 10, who were for the prosecution. We know all the details about Booth’s horse, that he had a star on his face, things that were documented, whereas we don’t know what happened to Mary Simms after the trial. We don’t have a photograph of her. That puts it into perspective, how unimportant her life was at the time. I thought she was just incredibly courageous and moving, [but] the process was about working backward. It was all about getting from A to C while not knowing any of the B, and fictionalizing that.

You’ve spoken previously about the misconceptions that we still have about Mary Todd Lincoln and how tragic her life really was. How did you want to show more dimension to her, and also depict more of her relationship with Lincoln, beyond the wider reputation that she has?

BELETSKY: I went into it with the knee-jerk reaction a lot of us have, which is that she was mentally unstable. But when I read about her relationship with Lincoln and what she had been through in her life, I really saw her differently. I was very excited to tell a different version of her. And when we were able to cast Lili [Taylor], it was just… the cast couldn’t be cast more perfectly, and she was such a win for this role. [Mary Todd Lincoln] was very involved with fundraising to help free people. Her relationship with her dressmaker, Elizabeth Keckley, played by Betty Gabriel, was something that I wanted to show. This Black woman was in a very close circle in the White House during that time. Of course, the assassination, you could argue, affected her the most. I had never known what happened to her afterward or that she was essentially left destitute, and I felt that was something that the audience would want to know.

You’ve shared some anecdotes already about what you learned in digging into the history, what Anthony Boyle passed along from Booth’s journals, and what you were able to uncover while you were researching. Was there anything that really surprised you when you found it, where you knew you had to put it in the show?

BELETSKY: So many things. There’s probably a few things in every episode. I did not know about Manhattan and Montreal’s involvement in the Confederacy. Episode 4 centers around the fact that there were people in Manhattan who wanted to secede from the Union because they were profiting so much from the slave trade on Wall Street. I also didn’t know that Montreal was a harbor for Confederates who were escaping and couldn’t be extradited, so the whole spy story with Conover was something I was really excited to weave in once I learned about it.

Manhunt premieres March 15 on Apple TV+.

Watch on Apple TV+