Anthony Boyle (‘Masters of the Air’ and ‘Manhunt’), on playing a hero and then a villain: ‘It was good to go from one extreme to the other’ [Exclusive Video Interview]

Ray Richmond
·6 min read
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It’s the rare actor has an opportunity to portray a real-life World War II hero and a notorious villain of American history in the space of just a few months, but the Irish-born Anthony Boyle is that guy. He’s king of the prestigious limited series in 2024 in a pair of big-ticket Apple TV+ projects. He was starring as Lieut. Harry Crosby of the Air Force’s famed Bloody Hundredth bomber group in the nine-part, $250 million epic “Masters of the Air” from the team that made “Band of Brothers” and “The Pacific,” Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman. And a few months after completing filming on that in England, Boyle started work on the seven-part historical drama “Manhunt” portraying no less than John Wilkes Booth, the man who assassinated President Abraham Lincoln. “I wanted to do kind of the opposite of what I’d just done,” Boyle says. “It was good to go from one extreme to the other.” Watch our exclusive video interview above.

It’s quite a heady time for the 29-year-old Boyle, born in Belfast, who had previously spent the better part of three years portraying Scorpius Malfoy on stage in “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” first in London’s West End (where he won an Olivier Award) and then on Broadway (where he was nominated for a Tony). He landed the role of Crosby at the height of the pandemic. “People were falling off and getting COVID constantly, and we were having to be isolated in groups,” he recalls. “It was tough.”

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Meanwhile, the man Boyle was portraying in “Masters of the Air” was himself consistently afflicted with airsickness. “I originally auditioned for another role in the piece, but I really, really liked Crosby because everyone else felt cool in it, and he was throwing up on people and I didn’t feel like he belonged in the story. I just thought he was an interesting person to follow. I wanted to play him.” And so, he did, opposite a stellar cast that includes Oscar nominees and BAFTA winners Austin Butler and Barry Keoghan. He had a memorable moment at the series’ premiere in Los Angeles when he was told all of Crosby’s real-life family was there. (Crosby himself had died in 2010.)

“I met his eldest kid at the premiere, ” Boyle recalls. “He shook my hand and said, ‘I feel like we got Dad back.’ And it was such a good moment. I sort of thought, well, if the critics pan me now, it doesn’t really matter because I got a decent seal of approval from the son.”

SEE‘Masters of the Air’ could become Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks’ next Emmy masterpiece

In terms of “Manhunt” – a conspiracy thriller about the hunt for Booth following his killing of Lincoln – Boyle likes to joke that, as an Irishman, his sole knowledge of the assassination came from an episode of “The Simpsons” in which Bart comes onstage during a school play dressed as Arnold Schwarzenegger in “The Terminator” brandishing a toy gun that he points at his friend Milhouse and intoning, “Hasta la vista, Abey!”.

“That really was my sole introduction to Booth,” Boyle admits. “Growing up in Ireland, we didn’t do too much American history.” But Boyle quickly grew fascinated with Booth, reading a cache of his actual letters he wrote between the ages of 15 and 26. “I just got a sense of who he was from those and his descent into madness and into racism,” he emphasizes.

Growing an impressive bushy mustache to match the mustachioed Booth wasn’t a huge obstacle for Boyle. “For some reason, it grows loud and proud on my face,” he says. The bigger challenge was learning how to ride a horse. He’d never been on one before. So the production arranged for him to arrive several weeks early and put him through what came to be known as “cowboy camp,” where he met up with seven actual cowboys to put Boyle through his paces of horse riding, tobacco chewing and whiskey drinking – in other words, how to be a real macho dude.

“There was this whole machismo thing going on with these guys.” Boyle remembers. “I just walked up to this horse for the first time and asked, ‘How do I get on him?’ And one of them was like, ‘Figure it out.’ So, I figured out how to get on and I’m feeling quite cool. I feel like John Wayne or something. I ask, ‘How do I make him go?’ And the guy goes, ‘Kick him.’ So I kick the horse and we start trotting a little bit and I kick him again because I want him to go faster. And I kick him again and suddenly we’re galloping quickly, so I ask, ‘How di I make him stop?’ And this other guy goes, ‘Figure it out.’ So I just pulled on the reins and we stopped on a dime and another of the cow2boys approaches and asks, ‘How’d you know how to do that?’ And another cowboy from the back goes, ‘He’s Irish, it’s in his blood.’ We just rolled for three weeks and I got pretty good at it.”

And they taught Boyle how to drink whiskey, too?

“No,” he replies, “that’s what I taught them.”

“Masters of the Air” and “Manhunt” are streaming on Apple TV+, with the final pair of “Manhunt” installments premiering on April 12 and 19.

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