Watch Ethan Hawke as John Brown in The Good Lord Bird trailer

Ethan Hawke leads the Showtime miniseries

The trailer for new Showtime miniseries The Good Lord Bird starring Ethan Hawke as the controversial real-life American historical figure John Brown has dropped. Take a look at the footage in the video player below:

Based on the National Book Award-winning novel by James McBride, 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. Armory at Harpers Ferry. Brown’s raid failed to initiate the slave revolt he intended, but was the event that started the Civil War.

In the trailer, Ethan Hawkes is brilliantly bonkers, screaming and shouting his way around as expected when portraying the character. The Good Lord Bird also stars Daveed Diggs as Frederick Douglass, Wyatt Russell as First Lieutenant J. E. B. Stuart, McKinley Belcher III as Broadnax, and Rafael Casal as Cook.

The series is executive produced by Jason Blum, Ethan and Ryan Hawke, Mark Richard, Padraic McKinley, Jeremy Gold, Marci Wiseman, Albert Hughes, James McBride, Brian Taylor, Marshall Persinger and David Schiff.

What do you think of the trailer for the new series? Will you be watching it when it arrives on Showtime? As always, we like to know your thoughts, so leave a comment below, tweet us @filmandtvnow or drop us a comment on our Facebook page.

THE GOOD LORD BIRD arrives in the States via Showtime on August 9th. No information has been released yet about where and when you’ll be able to see it in the UK.

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