Man of Action

If you stand for the Lord, the Lord will stand for you!” So bellows the abolitionist John Brown, as played by the Texas native Ethan Hawke in his starring role in the spirited Showtime miniseries , which begins airing October 4. Hawke, the forty-nine-year-old four-time Oscar nominee, also executive produced the miniseries—which is based on the 2013 National Book Award–winning novel by James McBride—with, among others, his wife, Ryan, and Jason Blum (). ¶ tells the story of Brown—played in a winning, full-throated manner by Hawke—as told by a fictional, formerly enslaved child named Onion. Freed by Brown, Onion joins him and his crew of abolitionists during the Bleeding Kansas confrontations in the late 1850s and follows him to the famous raid on the Harpers Ferry armory, after which Brown was captured, tried, and hanged, becoming the first