Showtime dropped the trailer for its limited series adaptation of James McBride’s “The Good Lord Bird” Tuesday, offering up a first look at Ethan Hawke playing “controversial abolitionist” John Brown. And let’s just say Hawke’s portrayal of the historical figure is, uh, eccentric.
Based on McBride’s National Book Award-winning novel of the same name, “The Good Lord Bird” is told from the point of view of Onion (Joshua Caleb Johnson), “a fictional enslaved boy who becomes a member of Brown’s motley family of abolitionist soldiers during Bleeding Kansas – a time when the state was a battleground between pro- and anti-slavery forces – and eventually finds himself participating in the famous 1859 raid on the U.S.