As an actor, Tobias Menzies looks best when he’s perturbed: fitting ill into the monarchy as Prince Phillip in The Crown, incompetent and tragic as Edmure Tully in Game of Thrones, weighed down by upper-middle-class malaise in You Hurt My Feelings, and now, holding together the American republic in Manhunt. The expression falls naturally from what my colleague Kathryn VanArendonk describes in a 2019 profile as a handsome ruggedness that comes “largely from his cheeks; both feature noticeable, unusually deep vertical creases that frame his face.†Indeed, there’s something old-school — as in, Victorian-era old-school — about Menzies’s visage, which he consistently uses to convey deep emotion roiling just beneath its surface. Defined, geometrically dramatic, and often doing its finest work when kept stiff, Menzies’s is a face perfect for Kuleshovean face acting.
In Manhunt, the new Apple TV+ series adapting James L. Swanson’s book about the pursuit of Abraham Lincoln’s killers, Menzies’s face gets ample opportunity to shine in his first-ever first-billed role. As Edwin Stanton, Lincoln’s secretary of war, he juggles responsibilities as lead investigator in the hunt for John Wilkes Booth and his Confederate conspirators while trying to prevent Reconstruction from falling apart in the wake of the president’s assassination. Manhunt allows Menzies to take full advantage of his physical gifts: a low, near-growling voice that projects stern gravitas; a ramrod back that gives Stanton an air of unbending will; and of course, those two vertical creases lining his cheeks, which draw out the rich countenance of a man burdened with the weight of the world.
Taking place in a period when men favored top hats, cravats, and perhaps most importantly, extensive facial hair, Manhunt uses the era’s aesthetics to the advantage of its leading man. Menzies gets to parade around a set of long sideburns, the equivalent of a tasteful three-piece suit that appears fancy without crowding out the underlying assets it’s dressing. This particular choice from the hair and makeup departments, led by Colleen LaBaff and Robin Beauchesne respectively, illustrates a production team that knows exactly what an lead actor is capable of, though nitpicky American history nerds will probably gripe at the liberty being taken: The real Stanton was often pictured with a lengthy, scraggly, somewhat unpleasant beard. (Manhunt’s other stars don’t get the same glow-up: Anthony Boyle parks John Wilkes Booth’s world-historical narcissism behind an ample full-bodied mustache, while Hamish Linklater is unrecognizable beneath layers of prosthetics as Abraham Lincoln.) And those sideburns look great! Not since The Terror, or maybe Underworld: Blood Wars, has Menzies’s noggin been costumed so well. His face is his greatest weapon. Why hide it?
But it’s the show’s structure as a long-form investigation, which borders on a classic detective procedural (Law and Order: Civil War!), that allows Menzies to run free with his signature look of perturbation. He performs Stanton as a workaholic worrywart, a man constantly turning things over in his brain even when he’s coughing during an asthma flare-up or cracking a smile in a quiet moment. All his facial tools come into play despite his tightly-wound expression: Menzies’s lips purse, his forehead creases, his mouth tucks to the side. Extracting depth from contrast, the actor only uses his eyes to betray glimmers of Stanton’s true feelings. The Secretary of War is portrayed as a man desperately fighting to keep both himself, and the country he serves, from spiraling into the abyss. It’s a tense, tricky, and elaborate tale, and the whole thing is written on Menzies’s face.
