The Good Lord Bird (miniseries)

• Ethan Hawke as John Brown[6]
• Hubert Point-Du Jour as Bob
• Beau Knapp as Owen Brown
• Nick Eversman as John Brown Jr.
• Ellar Coltrane as Salmon Brown
• Jack Alcott as Jason Brown
• Mo Brings Plenty as Ottawa Jones
• Daveed Diggs as Frederick Douglass
• Joshua Caleb Johnson as Henry "Onion" Shackleford[7]

• Wyatt Russell as First Lieutenant J. E. B. Stuart
• Rafael Casal as John Cook
• McKinley Belcher III as Broadnax
• Steve Zahn as Chase
• Victor Williams as Coachman Jim
• Miles Mussenden as Dangerfield Newby
• Ali Amin Carter as Lewis Leary
• Orlando Jones as The Rail Man
• Brooks Ashmanskas as Lewis Washington

• Zainab Jah as Harriet Tubman
• Maya Hawke as Annie Brown
• David Morse as Dutch Henry Sherman
• Alex Sharp as Preacher
• Killer Mike as Clarence
• Keith David as Herbert

Ethan Hawke and Jason Blum adapted the novel, The Good Lord Bird, for a limited series that premiered on October 4, 2020 on Showtime.[17] The series was created and executive produced by Hawke and Mark Richard. Jason Blum, via Blumhouse Television, served as a production partner on the miniseries.[18][19] Albert Hughes, Kevin Hooks, Darnell Martin, and Haifaa al-Mansour each directed an episode.[20]

In August 2019, Daveed Diggs and Wyatt Russell signed on to portray Frederick Douglass and First Lieutenant J. E. B. Stuart, respectively.[21][22][23] In July 2019, Joshua Caleb Johnson and Rafael Casal joined the cast as Henry "Onion" Shackleford and John Cook, respectively.[24]

In July 2019, filming began in Richmond, Virginia.[25][26]

For the series, review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reported an approval rating of 98% based on 52 reviews, with an average rating of 8.52/10. The website's critics consensus reads, "Ethan Hawke dazzles in The Good Lord Bird, an epically irreverent adaptation that does right by its source material's good word."[27] On Metacritic, the series has a weighted average score of 84 out of 100 based on reviews from 25 critics, indicating "universal acclaim."[28]

In response to John Lahr's profile of Ethan Hawke,[29] The New Yorker published a letter to the editor[30] written by Marty Brown, a descendant of John Brown. In the letter, Marty Brown welcomes the effort to bring John Brown's story to a wider audience but notes that his characterization in the series does not reflect the work of Brown's historians and biographers.[31]