Brown, a deeply religious man, is also a divisive figure in history. He felt that "moral suasion is hopeless" and petitions pointless, and instead saw violence as the best way to eliminate American slavery.
"He is such an interesting figure in the history of the United States of America and he's kind of a real lightning rod," Hawke says. "I think for generations, people have been scared to talk about him. And I think for everybody working on this, this part of history is the fact that we were there dramatising the raid at Harpers Ferry and knowing it had never been dramatised before. It felt like being the first people to make the story of something as historic as the Alamo.
"It's so significant and it's been so dangerous for people to discuss, and our author, James McBride, seeing it through [the eyes of Henry "Onion" Shackleford] is the genius of the story because it's not trying to teach you," Hawke says.
"It's not a history lesson in some kind of boring, academic way. It's a story being told from the heart and so you're witnessing history through somebody's personal viewpoint and that viewpoint being an extremely interesting one."
The series comes to television as America grapples with issues of race and financial inequity in a way almost unprecedented in modern times.
"It's always important [to tell stories like this] but a lot of young people today don't even understand," Hawke says. "I was just in St Louis, and St Louis is still vibrating from [the rioting in] Ferguson. I think a lot of young people particularly don't know all the dominoes that fell before the dominoes that are falling now.
Ethan Hawke as John Brown in The Good Lord Bird.Credit:Kevin Lynch/Showtime
"By letting you look at it, and actually look at it with love, there's a chance," he says. "And I think particularly, I'm very hopeful that this'll be a great thing to put into the world before the [US presidential] election because it doesn't have an agenda about who you should vote for.
"It has an agenda about the truth. And if we just talk about, [and] smoke out the truth about where this country's roots really are and where it's sick and where it's healthy."
Perhaps the most delicate element of the story is the way it uses humour to illuminate complex and painful themes from American history.
"The aim is difficult, the target is hard to hit," Hawke says. "We found it because when we tell the story right, the way that McBride does, he managed to get you to laugh about very dramatic things.
"So it's not a comedy and it's not avoiding the truth of the pain; it's trying to see the pain with a smile on your face and [with] a understanding of how ridiculous and fragile human beings are. The show succeeds the most when it does both at the same time."
The biggest challenge, Hawke says, was producing a piece of cinematic television while remaining very faithful to McBride's original novel.
"We had to turn McBride's novel into cinema. We had to perform it. We had to change it. We had to love it. There is something original in what McBride had accomplished, something that nobody in the world had ever seen before or read before and something that I wanted to share with the world."
For Hawke, The Good Lord Bird exemplifies what a limited series could do. "My whole life it's either been you're on a TV show or you're in movies."
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Like many actors, Hawke has found himself in the crossroads of old-school paradigms which are breaking down, and streaming and cable platforms ramping up limited series and long-form storytelling. Change is good, he says.
"It used to be that thousands and thousands of people would go to Broadway every year and Broadway was the leader in entertainment, A Streetcar Named Desire wins the Tony, then it wins the Oscar and then it changes," he says.
"It doesn't mean that Broadway is irrelevant. Broadway is still extremely relevant, but it's about how it affects our experience of going to the cinema.
"My wife and I would go to the movies, go out and talk about it, and it's so much fun and it's so important to see a movie that way," he adds. "It doesn't mean that my son with his head phones watching The Godfather didn't have a totally amazing experience watching on his damn phone.
"What can I tell you? It's just the reality of where we are. And the good news is that young people don't have a division. When I was a kid, it was like Peter Falk is a TV star and Robert Redford is a movie star. There's no hierarchy like that. There's good art and there's bad art. And I think that's awesome."
The Good Lord Bird is on Stan
Michael Idato is the culture editor-at-large of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.
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October 11, 2020 at 12:00PM
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So what's so funny about America's painful history of racism? - Sydney Morning Herald
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