Manhunt's Anthony Boyle on Playing John Wilkes Booth, a Pathetic Monstrosity

John Wilkes Booth was the worst. Even if he hadn’t assassinated Abraham Lincoln and ruined some of Reconstruction’s more powerful measures for integrating freed Black people into American social and political life, Booth was still a vain, violent, callow, self-aggrandizing bigot. 

Anthony Boyle, who plays Booth in the gripping, bracing Apple TV+ limited series Manhunt, invests his performance with all of these facets of Booth’s personality, while never making him a caricature, and crucially, never allowing him to appear as an all-too-seductive antihero. Instead, drawing on the “self-delusion and grandeur and pure, pure narcissism” he found in Booth’s letters, Boyle shows what made the man such a riveting actor and wily foe, turning on a dime repeatedly in nearly every scene to calibrate his real-time performance as himself to get his way in his attempts to evade capture by the Union, directed by War Secretary Edwin Stanton (Tobias Menzies). 

Boyle ensures that there’s no rooting for Booth, no room to spin excuses for the devastation that his role in the assassination plot wreaked on the path of U.S. history. There is room, however, for him and the audience to have a bit of fun at Booth’s expense, by highlighting his towering vanity. 

Over the course of Manhunt’s first five episodes, we’ve seen Booth whine about shaving off his mustache (“it’s my signature look!”), snatch a newspaper out of a co-conspirator’s hands to read the “reviews” of his exploits at Ford’s Theatre, and muse that a post-escape life in the military wouldn’t really be his cup of tea. A uniform? Please. He wants to select his own wardrobe, thank you very much. One half-expects to hear him start talking about brand management.

On the eve of Manhunt’s final episode, Anthony Boyle spoke with Primetimer, gamely sharing insights about his process for developing this performance, the “white generic face” that’s so effective in historical roles, and his joking (but perhaps also manifestation-worthy!) thoughts about being cast in a fantasy series, or one set in space. 

In “A Man of Destiny,” the series’s fifth episode, Booth and his co-conspirator David Herold (Will Harrison) attempt to blend in with a group of defeated Confederate soldiers preparing to take a ferry from Maryland to Virginia to sign their oaths of allegiance to the Union and making their ways home. Despite Booth’s earlier protestations about military uniforms, he and Herold have disguised themselves in the uniforms of two dead Texans found on a Maryland riverbank, but thanks to Booth’s penchant for running his mouth, they’re caught out by another soldier who can tell they weren’t at the Battle of Bull Run. 

Booth, thinking he’ll be hailed as the symbolic hero he believes himself to be, reveals himself with a flourish, taking off his Texas infantry cap, and shaking out his slightly mussed, curly locks before loudly announcing that he may not have been at Bull Run, but he was at Ford’s Theatre on April 14, in the president’s box, if you catch his drift.

It’s a disastrous misread of the room, as the actual soldiers denounce his behavior as disgraceful and totally lacking in honor. Boyle shaking out his mane takes no more than two seconds, and yet it captures Booth’s essence, and is screamingly funny to boot, a tantalizing hint at comedy chops the 29 year-old actor hasn’t yet fully deployed on screen. When asked about imbuing his performance with Booth’s particular brand of 19th century f*ckboy nonsense, Boyle laughs, then concurs that “19th-century f*ckboy nonsense is what I based it on – that’s the real starting point.” 

Boyle was keenly aware of Booth’s vanity and used the perm he’d gotten for the role to emphasize it; “shaking out the hair made sure we could see the perm in its full glory.” Even in his desperation — Boyle notes that by this point, Booth is “delirious, and he’s drunk from all the whiskey” he’s been chugging for pain relief from a broken leg that’s looking increasingly bad — Booth wants applause. He wants to take all the credit, and none of the responsibility for his actions. To be repudiated by a group of men he was certain would embrace him is a stinging blow, and is the beginning of the end for the would-be Confederate icon.

Matters don’t improve from there for the two fugitives, who in “Useless” (the series’s penultimate episode and Booth’s last) are eventually cornered by Union forces in a Virginia farmer’s tobacco barn. Herold sensibly surrenders, but Booth refuses, even when his captors set the barn on fire. 

Reflecting on the intensity required to perform well over such a long, high-stakes set piece, Boyle aimed for a space between preparation and looseness, because “you just have to throw yourself into it emotionally and physically. We anticipate, but there’s no real prep for it, because you can’t really rehearse this in your kitchen.” Openness to a scene subverting his expectations during a take also proved essential, giving him options that rigid overpreparation would stymie. Summoning Booth’s increasingly doomed bravado called for deciding “to try and be in the emotional state that he would be in, and just sort of letting it fly.” 

Remarkably, Boyle and Tobias Menzies collaborated very little on developing performances that would be an intertwining study in contrasts. Booth and Stanton never meet outside of a dream sequence — indeed, Stanton’s almost tender brushing away a curly lock that’s fallen across the forehead of Booth’s corpse is as close as we get to a scene between them — but their characters are nevertheless deep in conversation throughout Manhunt. 

Boyle recalls that “the first time I really saw what he was going to do was at the read-through. And I was like, ah, this is gonna be good, because it was very different to what I’m doing.” Incorporating pinpoint-accurate flashes of Menzies’ facial and vocal performances, Boyle goes on, “He came in doing the whole thing with his mouth and the accent, and I thought well, that’s kind of small and intricate, and Booth is very loud and big. I thought, Oh, if we get lucky here, the performances will complement one another.” They got lucky, though it was far more the result of two sterling performances than anything approaching chance. 

Boyle has already delivered two major performances in historical dramas in 2024 so far, and is gearing up for a third and fourth with the Tudor-era murder mystery series Shardlake set to premiere May 1 on Hulu, and the highly anticipated FX adaptation of Patrick Radden Keefe’s award-winning Say Nothing, which will span 40 years of The Troubles in Northern Ireland. He’s philosophical about his current place as a go-to guy for this genre, referring to his “white generic face” that makes him “kind of look like” this or that historical figure and describing this trend in his career as a confluence of interesting scripts and “quickly getting known for doing that one thing … I think maybe I need to play someone who has a laptop.” Perhaps the future will take him to a role set in a fictional future, one with “moon boots and a jetpack, maybe an astronaut,” or even see him “jump on the dragon-riding bandwagon” in a fantasy series. Whatever it is, dare to hope for more moments as unforgettable as that hair-shaking bit of business in Manhunt. 

Manhunt is streaming on Apple TV+. Join the discussion about the show in our forums.

Sophie Brookover is a culturally omnivorous writer covering TV (everything from sci-fi to sitcoms to prestige drama to sports docuseries), costume design, music, books, and podcasts. Her bylines are at Vulture, The Daily Beast, Town & Country, Fashionista, and Hey Alma, among others.