With his red cap pulled down over horn-rimmed glasses, Tobias Menzies walks into a London hotel with the wariness of a man who might just be recognized. It’s his face that would catch him out, those deep lines running from eyes to chin. “He had those even as a young man,” says his friend the theater director Rupert Goold. “It’s like someone has taken a knife and carved them. And I feel those lines run deep inside him as well. He’s grown into his face like a lot of actors do.”
Menzies’s smile is warm and his handshake firm, and though he lives not far from here in north London’s Crouch End, he is dressed more as a country dweller than a man-about-town, in jeans and blue gilet zipped over a soft mustard-and-red-checked shirt. Only his Grenson trainers, white and red and with flashes of the same yellow, suggest he might belong to an artier milieu.
“I don’t get recognized on any intrusive level, but it’s not a part of that I love,” he admits as we settle down to talk. “I like to watch people—I don’t like them to watch me.” I’ve asked him about the experience he’s having at 49—that of a talent stepping into his prime. Blame it on The Crown, in which he played the second incarnation of Prince Philip across two seasons (a role that won him an Emmy), and last year’s wry, acclaimed comedy You Hurt My Feelings, in which he starred opposite Julia Louis-Dreyfus (“He’s one of the most warm and present actors I’ve worked with,” says its director, Nicole Holofcener). And now, he’s appearing in two leading-man roles, as Edwin Stanton, Abraham Lincoln’s secretary of war, in Apple TV+’s series Manhunt in March, and he’s currently onstage in The Hunt, an adaptation of the 2012 Thomas Vinterberg film directed by Goold, playing at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn five years after its London premiere.
“I’ve got to be honest, I really liked it,” Menzies says of the status he enjoyed in Manhunt. “Being in the engine room of it and part of the storytelling decisions.” The series is part thriller and part history lesson, set over the 12 days following Lincoln’s assassination in 1865 as Stanton attempts to track down the president’s killer, John Wilkes Booth (it’s based on historian James L. Swanson’s 2006 bestseller). Episodes skip forward and backward, tracing the story of a tumultuous time and the ideological schisms that caused the Civil War and continued long after it. Stanton, a brilliant lawyer and strategist, is at the center of everything, clashing with Lincoln’s successor, President Andrew Johnson, as he attempts to preserve the late president’s legacy.
As gripping as any detective story, Manhunt addresses painful facts of America’s past: “The implications of losing Lincoln and what that meant for African American people,” says showrunner Monica Beletsky, who spent four years developing the project and who has followed Menzies’s career since they overlapped as students at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) in London (she on a stint studying there from the US). “You could argue in a way that the Confederates won the peace,” Menzies points out. “What is important about Monica making the show is that she is a person of color, and arguably the big fallout from Lincoln’s assassination was that Reconstruction was lost until 100 years later and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Voting rights, land rights—they didn’t happen. A lot of the things that African Americans have been fighting so hard for, for so long, were on Stanton’s agenda.”
Menzies studied carefully for the role (“He prepares months in advance,” says Beletsky), working to find Stanton’s voice and make his accent seem effortless, but also reading widely about the Civil War and its aftermath. Doris Kearns Goodwin’s classic history Team of Rivals was a particularly rich source: “It takes you into this very disparate group Lincoln collected around him,” Menzies says. “There was such a diversity of opinion and a lot of antagonism, but that was part of the power of it.” Menzies also studied Gregory Peck’s towering performance as Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird. “I was thinking of those archetypes that American literature and film are full of,” he says. “Because it’s such a whirlwind story with so many different characters floating through it—so you need a moral compass.”
The key to the character became a combination of “stoicism and radicalism,” Menzies says—and as an actor, he’s exceptionally good at playing men who are fighting such opposing impulses, with strong currents of feeling running beneath an impassive surface. “He is one of those rare actors who does a lot with silence,” Beletsky says. “He makes you believe you can feel what he is thinking, and he can do those things without saying a word.”