And with that, it’s goodbye toEthan Hawke’s John Brown.
“I’m the luckiest man in the whole world.”
After a shared prayer, they both apologize for their various mistakes.
Credit: William Gray/SHOWTIME
Before Onion departs, he asks Brown why he never asked about his reasoning for dressing like a girl.
“Whatever you are, Onion, be it in full,” he responds.
Onion later watches from afar as Brown is hanged.
William Gray/SHOWTIME
John Brown’s Super Bowl is his prayer life.
He viewed himself as a tool to be used by the divine.
So the ending of our show is exactly as James McBride scripted it.
When it came to filming Brown’s hanging, how did you want to play that?
Some of these people were Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, John Wilkes Booth, Stonewall Jackson.
They were all at John Brown’s hanging.
Basically everybody who saw it was killed in two shakes of a dog’s ass.
God’s time is different than our time.
Onion theorizes that Brown’s final words were “What a beautiful country.”
Did you feel that at all?I feel the same way.
We see the label.
You see a dress, it’s a girl.
For Onion’s Black friends and people he encounters, they see it clearly.
But a lot of white people don’t really look very deeply.
And I think that their love and sense of passion for one another is real and founded in truth.
But it doesn’t start that way, and it’s work to see beyond the labels.
I think McBride milks that joke for all it’s worth.
It’s produced by her stepmother and my wife [Ryan Hawke].
The show needs her energy, that kind of feminine power that she brings.
It needs it like water.
And he’s told to “Make your own freedom.”
There he is, riding away at the end like John Wayne.
It’s a classic image of the American art form, the Western.
He’s riding north, following freedom.
The series ends with portrait shots of theGood Lord Bird’s Black characters.
It’s been a terrible crime, and that infrastructure needs to be rebuilt.
In the months since you’ve wrapped, what was it like trying to shake off John Brown?
It’s a very beautiful homestead.
And when it was over, I didn’t know how to end it.
That would be a really cool thing to continue this conversation.
It’s such a massive and beautiful character.
It’s never been fully dramatized.
I don’t know if other people have.
I’ll be really curious to see as the months go on.
I watched the first four in a row and then the last three in one sitting.
All seven at once might be a bit heavy!That’s exactly how I would recommend it.
[Laughs] The four and then three is kind of perfect.
We didn’t create these problems, but we are living in them.
I find history to be so exciting.
As a show, I never wanted it to be a history lesson.
Sometimes when you’re teaching people, you’re boring the hell out of them.
You get more bees with honey.
