History’s latest collaboration with Pulitzer Prize-winning presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin focuses on the United States’ beloved 16th president, Abraham Lincoln. The three-night documentary miniseries premieres on Sunday, February 20, 2022 and features Emmy Award nominee Graham Sibley (Dark/Web) as President Lincoln.
Abraham Lincoln is based on Goodwin’s Leadership: In Turbulent Times and fleshes out many aspects of Lincoln’s incredible life. The miniseries will mix interviews with experts, archival photos, and Lincoln’s own writings to paint a fuller picture of our 16th president’s personality.
Executive producer Doris Kearns Goodwin and Graham Sibley joined executive producer Dave Sirulnick for the 2022 Television Critics Association’s virtual winter press tour to discuss making the seven-and-a-half-hour docuseries.
Doris Kearns Goodwin said the miniseries examines Abraham Lincoln from young adulthood through his death. It will help audiences have a better understanding of what makes Lincoln such a fascinating historical figure.
“You see a man who’s contradictory about whether he’s going to go for emancipation or whether he just is going to go for the union,” said Goodwin. “He’s got all sorts of depression that he’s suffering with his entire life, but humor is the way that he gets his resilience back. He loses that first race for the senate – two races for the senate, a first race for the state legislature – but he keeps going and he finally wins.”
Graham Sibley added, “I think someone who struggles with depression and finds respite in humor is something that is so humble. There’s a sense of humility that goes to that. I think that’s what makes him so accessible, and like Doris says, companionable.”
Sibley plays Lincoln from age 21 through his death at age 56. During the TCA panel, Sibley revealed he didn’t watch any films or series to prepare to play the iconic politician.
“I did the opposite of that. I was terrified that I would be in the wake of Daniel Day-Lewis, so I had to figure out how to take that on,” explained Sibley. “I also am a painter and I felt like, in a way, there’s a world where people paint to figure out how to paint like a master. And so, I did that for a while. I really wanted to embody [him]. I wanted to figure out how he did it. And then, I wanted to throw all that away and cross-reference it with my own research and connection.”
Doris Kearns Goodwin confessed that initially the thought of writing about the “Moby Dick of American history” was scary, yet she found Lincoln scholars to be extraordinarily helpful.
“I hadn’t studied the 19th century, and the incredible thing I found was that the Lincoln scholars were so hopeful. I was able to stand on their shoulders. They introduced me…David Donald, who was one of the great Lincoln scholars…introduced me to his library. He introduced me to fellow historians, and there’s a certain sense in which Lincoln’s desire not to have resentments toward other people or feel jealous of other people or feel envy plays off on all of us who studied him,” said Goodwin.
Goodwin even told Sibley prior to filming that he would come out of the experience a better person.
“You actually said, ‘Graham, this is going to change your life. This is going to change things for you,’ and it has so profoundly changed. Spending this much focused time with Abraham Lincoln, it redefines what you think strength is,” said Sibley. “This experience just asks so much of me and anyone, I think, who spends time with him recognizes the immense struggles that he was under. It demands self-discipline and integrity and honesty, and it just goes on and on and on [with] these major hurdles that he had to overcome. I’m just dangling onto a thread of it trying to put some veil of reality to it. But to imagine what he must have gone through is a lonely, isolating experience – but just a thread of what I’m sure he was going through.”
After five decades of researching great leaders, Doris Kearns Goodwin has concluded they all share certain qualities.
“I think the first one is humility, the ability to acknowledge errors and learn from your mistakes. We’ll see that with Abe Lincoln. He’s going to make mistakes and he’s going to understand them, and you’ll see stories where he moves forward. Empathy is absolutely essential after that, the ability to understand other people’s points of view. And then you’ve got resilience,” said Goodwin. “You go from failure and you keep going and you’re determined. He could hardly go to school and yet he read books in every spare moment he could find.”
Goodwin continued: “And then accessibility. He would have people come in in the mornings to talk to him, and he could hardly get anything done but he’s talking to them as ordinary people. Then the most important thing, maybe – and we need it so much today – his ambition was for the greater good rather than for himself. So when he was about to think he could lose an election in 1864, unless he compromised on slavery, he would not do it. He said, ‘God, I will not do this. I cannot do this.’
His moral purpose overlaid his desire to get power, and I think it’s such an important thing to see today. I think that’s what [Dave] built into the script from the very beginning. It’s the making of a leader. We’re seeing a young person who becomes the person he becomes, and that was in the early stages of the outlines in the treatment, right?”
“Yeah, and I think a sort of organizing principle that we worked with was Abe before Lincoln and that notion that there were many, many years – 50 years of his life – before he became president,” said Dave Sirulnick. “And the idea of understanding him as a man before the achievements, I think for a viewer, you really start to associate with somebody. You understand them. You make a connection with them. And I think through Graham’s performance, you really understand that through the dramatic scenes – our cinematic scenes, as we like to call them – you really understand a connection to Abe. And as Doris was saying, you understand his empathy, and you understand his compassion and his humor and his drive.”
Lincoln’s father never appreciated his scholarly son’s interest in books as child, believing it to be a sign of laziness. Fortunately, Abe’s stepmother was supportive of the boy’s quest for knowledge.
“[…] She acknowledged that he was talented. There was something special in him. She gave him the love that he needed, and I think what you see in that happening, and, again, we see all this because you’re going to see a really young Abe, and then a next young Abe, and you’re going to see him struggling against that background but somehow he got the ambition that he could be something different from what he was. And that’s what happens through literature. Somehow you can envision yourself in another world. Emily Dickinson said there’s no frigate like it to take us lands away, and how true that was. Lincoln’s reading allowed him to think, ‘I can be something different than living on this farm in this hardscrabble way.’”
Goodwin added: “I think that’s the real splendor of the way they’ve done this at the History Channel – and radical. And, of course, Graham as Lincoln, you’re going to watch him every step along the way becoming a leader. It’s so important for young people to see you when you’re in that difficult early time when you’ve got struggles, and then you can persevere and you, through resilience, become the person that Abraham Lincoln did. It gives you a sense of possibility. That’s my real hope for this.”
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The seven-and-a-half-hour miniseries will premiere over Presidents’ Day weekend airing across three consecutive nights on Sunday, February 20, Monday, February 21 and Tuesday, February 22, 2022 at 8pm ET/PT.
This post was last modified on February 20, 2022 9:15 pm