'The Crown's' Tobias Menzies to Lead the Search for Abraham Lincoln's Killer In Apple TV+'s 'Manhunt'

Everyone knows the story of President Abraham Lincoln's assassination. The ill-fated trip to Ford's Theatre to see Our American Cousin. The scuffle in the presidential box after Lincoln was shot. John Wilkes Booth leaping to the stage to declare that the South was avenged and thus always to tyrants. Other than that Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?

But far fewer people are likely familiar with what happened afterward. Lincoln's final hours in a boarding house across the street. The panic in the city, as residents wondered whether a Confederate attack was underway. The massive search for Booth that followed. And the trauma that went on to shadow the Lincolns' guests that night for the rest of their lives.

Well, Apple TV+'s latest limited series aims to change all that. Seven-part drama Manhunt will tell the story of John Wilkes Booth's escape and the massive mobilization to bring a president's killer to justice. Based on James L. Swanson's bestselling book Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer, the series will follow Booth's escape from Ford's Theatre on that fateful night in April 1865 when he, after breaking his leg in his jump from the presidential box, snuck out the back door of the theater and fled. Despite a $100,000 reward being offered for his capture, he managed to evade discovery for almost two weeks, leading the U.S. Army on a chase through Maryland and Virginia before he was finally cornered in a farmhouse in Port Royal, near Fredericksburg. He was shot while refusing to surrender and died on the property.