Manhunt had all the makings of a TV or film adaptation, even before historian James L. Swanson’s propulsive best-seller was published. Based on the pitch alone, Hollywood began bidding for the rights to the moment-by-moment breakdown of the hunt for John Wilkes Booth after he shot President Abraham Lincoln and fled on a broken leg from the chaos he left behind in Ford’s Theatre. In 2002, five years before Manhunt was published, Walden Media announced it would be making the adaptation, and three years after that they said Harrison Ford was set to star. 

The public’s enthusiasm only soared in 2007 when Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer finally hit bookshelves. The New York Times mentioned the forthcoming Ford adaptation in its review, and Swanson’s book became a bestseller. The Mystery Writers of America honored him with an Edgar Award for best fact crime book, and readers eagerly awaited the big-screen adaptation that had been promised. But nothing came of it. Variety reported in 2008 that The Wire creator David Simon and Oz creator Tom Fontana, who had previously collaborated on the Baltimore crime series Homicide, would take over the adaptation with plans to turn it into a series on HBO. That didn’t happen either.

Years passed. Then decades. Manhunt might have been consigned to the oblivion of once promising projects that nonetheless defied Hollywood adaptation—if not for producer and showrunner Monica Beletsky, a veteran writer from Friday Night Lights, Parenthood, and Fargo. “I had done some research and come across the figure of Edwin Stanton, the Secretary of War, and was so compelled by the fact that I had never been taught about the man. Essentially, the weight of everything after the assassination fell on his shoulders,” she tells Vanity Fair. “I thought that there could be a show in the universal story behind him, which is avenging a friend’s death.” 

She pitched an idea for a show to Apple TV+ that would chronicle the aftermath of Lincoln’s death, but at that point wasn’t thinking of adapting any specific history book. “I saw it as more of a conspiracy thriller, more of a cat-and-mouse detective story,” she said. “I loved the idea of making Stanton the cat to Booth’s mouse.”

Jamie Erlicht, one of the heads of video programming at Apple, was a fan of Manhunt, Beletsky said, and her prospective executive producers, Layne Eskridge and Kate Barry, learned the rights were available. Beletsky merged her interest in Stanton with Swanson’s book, which became the basis for the series she developed. Fans of Manhunt will finally see it on Apple TV+ next year on March 15. 

Beletsky’s approach to Manhunt emphasizes the precarious and volatile position of the country when Lincoln was killed. The Confederacy had begun to surrender to the Union, ending the Civil War, but hostility remained high. The Emancipation Proclamation freeing millions of enslaved people had been approved by Congress and sent to the states to be ratified as the 13th Amendment, but that process was months away from completion. America was coming back into balance, but still teetering.

“One of the things that I thought was really moving in Swanson’s research, that we talked about on the call I had with him before I started, was something that was really important to him and became important to me,” Beletsky says. It involved the vigil outside the home of William and Anna Petersen, next to Ford’s Theatre, where the president succumbed to his injuries. “When Lincoln’s body was brought into the Petersens’ after he was shot, a lot of the crowd was mixed—white theatergoers, people from DC, and African Americans. By the time it was morning and he had passed away, they brought the coffin out to the street, and it was almost all African American people still standing there. And I found that very moving and so did James. Of course this is because the question of emancipation was now sort of hanging in the balance.”

While there were many people involved in the hunt for Booth, Beletsky felt the character of Stanton would be an ideal lens for both the personal and political ramifications of Lincoln's assassination. “I started to imagine what it would be like to be the Secretary of War and then have the president murdered,” she says. “In a lot of ways people could interpret that as having been under your watch because it was perhaps an act of war. And meanwhile, this person was such a beloved figure, Lincoln, and they had become friends because they had worked so closely together behind the scenes during the war.”

Making the series also had personal dimensions for Beletsky, who can trace her own family history back to the seismic upheavals of this era. “We shot in Savannah, Georgia, which is the city where my grandmother’s grandmother took her first steps as a freed woman,” she says. “So when I was burnt out after a long day and night of writing and filming, I’d take inspiration from the fact I was making a TV show in the same city just a few generations later.”

In our own age of extreme division and distrust, Beletsky believes this story of an effort to violently unseat the president, and attack members of his war cabinet on the same night, still resonates because it speaks to “the shattering of norms in how we deal with disputes—and just our sense of safety.”

“I think the show has a lot about it that’s very relevant,” she says. “This was a domestic attack that was so unusual. Lincoln used to have the door to the White House unlocked for the duration of the war. So murder of this kind was just not done.”

Although Lincoln’s death is the starting point for the series, the 16th US president still features prominently throughout its episodes, mostly in flashback, as a means of underscoring the stakes, the motivations of the pursuers, and the depth of the loss. 

Tobias Menzies, best known for Game of Thrones and Outlander as well as for playing middle-aged Prince Philip on The Crown, stars as Stanton, a leader who had a tendency to micromanage rather than delegate, taking on the full weight of problems that may have benefited from being shared. Beletsky says Menzies delivered that gravity. “He brings a high level of intelligence to a role,” she says. “[Stanton] was one of the top trial lawyers in the country, and Tobias does it so convincingly that you believe this man has been in the Supreme Court, that he has been sitting with Lincoln.”

Lincoln himself is portrayed by Hamish Linklater, best known for The Newsroom and Legion and playing the mysteriously charismatic priest from Midnight Mass. “There are only so many actors who are as bright as Hamish and as tall as Hamish,” Beletsky says. “It takes a very brave actor to take on a role like this where everyone thinks they know who this person is. And Hamish was just so open and curious and just everything you want in an actor. I will say his performance is one of the things I’m most proud of.”

The third part of the story’s triangle is the killer, with Anthony Boyle (The Plot Against America) playing John Wilkes Booth, the actor who chose a theater as the place to lash out at the president he despised. Beletsky notes that Lincoln’s killer could have been lost to history if Booth had quietly slipped away, backed into the corridors of Ford’s Theatre, and escaped anonymously out into the streets of Washington, DC. Instead, he chose to enter the wounded president’s box and leap down onto the stage, where he shattered his leg and famously cried out Virginia’s state motto, the Latin phrase “sic semper tyrannis” (translation: thus always to tyrants), to a horrified audience, many of whom recognized him immediately.

“He was clearly someone who wanted to be known as the culprit,” Beletsky says. “I have Stanton say in a later episode, ‘This is someone who sees himself as a hero.’ Booth thought that he was going to be applauded and maybe even awarded for this. And I also think there’s a lot of psychology there with the fact that his father and his brother were the most famous actors in the country, and he was in third place. Pulling off a stunt like this meant something to him in terms of his legacy and his inability to surpass his brother and his father with their talent.”

Manhunt is an odyssey-type story, with Booth and his pursuers encountering numerous figures along his route across the Maryland panhandle and into Virginia. “I think the most challenging part of telling this story is that it’s an on-the-road show. It’s an on-the-run show,” Beletsky says. “So every hour you’re needing to meet new characters.”

Among them is Dr. Samuel Mudd, the physician who treated Booth’s leg and failed to immediately report the fugitive to local authorities. Legend says that the scorn he received is the origin for the phrase, “Your name is mud…” (Linguists dispute this, but a reference in the 2007 Nicolas Cage movie National Treasure: Book of Secrets has only cemented the myth in the public consciousness.)

To play Mudd, Beletsky chose a comedian, although the role itself is hardly comical. Matt Walsh (best known as the hapless press secretary in Veep) got the role of the conspiring physician because of his affable screen presence. “The discussion the director, Carl Franklin, and I had was, ‘Wouldn’t it be interesting if Dr. Mudd was somebody who was your friendly neighbor? Somebody who could be your kid’s pediatrician, or the guy who delivered your baby?’ That kind of guy might get away with other things rather than a person who is outwardly a villain.”

During Mudd’s treatment, Booth crosses paths with Mary Simms (played by Greenleaf’s Lovie Simone), who was enslaved by Mudd and later testified in the investigation into Lincoln’s killing. “Mary Simms is someone that I came across in the transcript of the conspirators trial,” says Beletsky. “I found her extremely compelling. I knew that she kept house for Dr. Mudd and that her brother was considered Dr. Mudd’s carpenter. So with that in mind, when Booth needs a crutch, I have Milo, her brother, making the crutch.”

“Lovie is not particularly used to playing roles where she’s very subservient. She doesn’t approach life like that at all. And so for her to step into this character took a lot of work, and a lot of emotional work,” Beletsky said. “We had a conversation about how frustrating it is that in the beginning of the series, she’s in doorways and she’s hiding. How that feels as a woman, how that feels as a Black woman, doesn’t feel so great. But there’s a point in the series where Mary Simms is not needing to stand in doorways anymore. I just remember Lovie and I saying, ‘You just have to get to that part and then it’s going to feel a lot different.’ I think she really honored our ancestors and Mary Simms in the work that she did.”

Another performer primarily known for comedy, Patton Oswalt, turns up as Lafayette Baker, one of the shadier characters in this chapter of history, known for his work as a Union spy in Confederate territory. Few felt for sure that they could trust him, even when he was pledged to their side, but he was called into service by Stanton to help track down Booth. “He helped to invent and modernize American spy and undercover techniques, and he was also a habitual liar,” Beletsky says. “So he’s one of those people who Stanton relies on because he’s very talented and very innovative. But it’s like doing a deal with the devil when you work with him—you’re not sure what you’re going to get.”

Lili Taylor plays the widowed first lady, Mary Todd Lincoln, and Beletsky said Manhunt tries to illuminate a different side of this historical woman, whose mental health difficulties have often shadowed her legacy. 

“A lot of people’s knee-jerk knowledge of Mary Lincoln is, ‘Oh, she was kind of crazy, right?’ Having read a lot about her, realizing that she went against her family, who were Confederates, that she supported her husband doing very radical things at the time throughout the Civil War, the fact that she lost two children and then her husband, my feeling was that she was owed a different portrayal. This was pre-psychology, pre-therapy, pre-understanding of trauma. I asked the question of, ‘How would you behave had you suffered so much loss?’”

Her memories are another way the show conjures the presence of Lincoln even after his death. “We get to see Mary Lincoln in a scene in episode four that’s one of my favorite scenes, where she ends up being in a debate with Stanton and Lincoln,” Beletsky says. “You see her at the height of her intelligence and heart.”

Her relationship with Stanton was sometimes adversarial. With his patience strained, he snaps at her in the immediate aftermath of her husband’s shooting, which only pushes them further apart. But as with Mary Todd, Stanton’s story is one of a person trying their best to hold things together amid unbearable pressures.

“Stanton, to me, represents the type of leader I think more of us wish we had. He is somebody who is a soldier for civil rights, and he does it in a way where he brings people up with him. As opposed to him being this savior figure, he’s always bringing people like Mary Simms to tell their own story,” Beletsky says. “That was very impressive to me, how ahead of his time he was. Part of my hope is that he will be someone our audience will admire as well and take inspiration from.”