Tobias Menzies Wants You to Read a History Book

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Tobias Menzies is no stranger to a period drama.

The British actor has famously starred in Outlander, as Frank Randall and Jonathan "Black Jack" Randall, in Game of Thrones as Edmure Tully, and The Crown as Prince Philip (in seasons three and four). His latest project also finds him firmly in the past, playing U.S. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton in Apple TV+'s thrilling new show Manhunt, which tells the story of the search for John Wilkes Booth after he assassinated Abraham Lincoln.

In an interview ahead of the premiere of Manhunt, Menzies is pondering whether or not he finds himself drawn to period dramas. "I suppose I must be," he muses. "It's a mixture of them finding me and me finding them, I guess. I think that there's some very interesting stories and interesting characters within those narratives, which I do find exciting to try and realize." What motivated him to play Stanton, Menzies says, is that this series is "an incredible story about a fascinating period of history, and Stanton is quite an interesting man at the heart of the story."

Manhunt, though it's set in 1865 America, feels deeply relevant to the current political climate, and Menzies hopes it will inspire viewers to learn more about this period in American history. "I want them to get beyond Google. I want them to pick a physical book," he says.

After you watch the show, Menzies recommends you read Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin. "It's an amazing book written about Lincoln's cabinet during the Civil War, these very conflicting disparate political figures that he brought together," Menzies says. "It's a very interesting read and gives it a very dynamic, interesting flavor of the political temperature and world. It's really brilliant and enjoyable read."

Goodwin's book formed a key part of Menzies's research to understand Stanton, but his career had already prepared him to play the complex character at the center of this historical thriller. From the start, Manhunt creator and showrunner Monica Beletsky believed he was the perfect man for the part. "Tobias is such an extraordinary actor," she tells T&C. "When he's in a story that takes place in the past, I feel that he brings such authenticity to it. You just believe that you're in that time period because he's so convincing of being from that era, first of all." In memes that have proliferated of late, people joke online how certain actors could never star in period pieces because they have faces that know what an iPhone is—eyes that have seen Instagram, so to speak. That would never apply to Menzies; the viewer immediately trusts that he could have lived in 1860s America.

Beletsky adds, "For the role of Edwin Stanton, Tobias might not have a physical resemblance to him, but Stanton was ahead of his time in terms of civil rights. Tobias has a real innate sense of right and wrong, and justice, and he picks projects that have real meaning to him. He's not someone who's just interested in like, 'How bad or cool can I be in this role?' He and I have that in common; we like projects that have another meaning to it. He brought a kindred spirit to Stanton, to the role."

But Menzies offers a different perspective. When I share Beletsky's compliment about his sense of justice, the actor ponders her comments. "I wouldn't say that I'm particularly moralistic about the roles I choose," he says. "I don't need to play good people. I suppose I'm just more drawn to complexity, and Stanton is that. He is a character who has a powerful moral compass, very strong sense of what is right and wrong, and how to do it and how not to do it. But he's also not a perfect person, and has his blind spots. Obviously within the show, we get a sense of the impact of that is being had on his family, his son. He's arguably not the best husband and father during the story."

In Manhunt, Menzies says that he hopes his portrayal of Stanton "adds light and shade and makes him a little more 3D and relatable." He continues, "I was interested in the loss that he had suffered; he had lost children. He's also clearly a legal mind, so the rigor of his thinking and processing, that felt important to the character. It's a mixture of both what Monica has chosen to draw out for the story and but also weaving in some of the elements [of his biography]. It's always an act of curation, really, or a job of creation, with all these things. You can't fit them all in."

Stanton is far from the first historical person Menzies has played in his career; most famous is his turn as Prince Philip in The Crown, but he's also portrayed Marcus Junius Brutus, Julius Caesar's friend-turned-assassin (Rome, 2005-2007), Ian Fleming, author of James Bond (Any Human Heart, 2010), and James Fitzjames, British Royal Navy officer who disappeared (The Terror, 2018). How does the real person's mannerisms and speech impact his performance? "With Philip, I definitely was [thinking about it], but that's because there's a lot of footage of him and a lot of audio of him," he says. "I didn't have that problem with Stanton," which he says was both good and bad: "I didn't have the resource of that, but also didn't have the challenge of being held up against that. I was obviously freer to interpret it."

That freedom extended to the hair and makeup choices for the War Secretary; Beletsky and the Manhunt team also decided to depict Stanton clean-shaven, instead of with the full beard. "At the time, beards were very modern," Beletsky says. "Lincoln was an inspiration for a lot of men to wear a beard. But if you see a scraggly beard on a man today, you might not think this is a very modern man." So, they went with a clean-shaven look for Menzies, to indicate that modernity.

"A lot of the photographs we do have of Stanton, he's incredibly whisker-y and there's a period look, which we moved away from in service of the genre we were choosing," Menzies says. "So we went for a sort cleaner silhouette for the person that we were having to follow through that story, given the complexity of it. I hope viewers will forgive us that license."

That freedom to make Stanton's story accessible for a modern audience is key to Manhunt's goals. "At a time when there's a quite consequential election in November, a story that speaks to the sort of fragility of these institutions and how they must be maintained and defended," Menzies says, "felt like quite an important story to be retelling at this juncture."

The first two episodes of Manhunt are now streaming on Apple TV+. Watch now

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