How Ethan Hawke and author James McBride adapted The Good Lord Bird for Showtime

“All of this is true. Most of it happened,” is the key tagline for Showtime’s The Good Lord Bird, an adaptation of author James McBride’s acclaimed novel of the same name, which recounts key events that lead to the Civil War through a fictional lens. As McBride and miniseries star/Executive Producer Ethan Hawke put it, the story’s quite a “whopper,” one with an irreverent take on an especially fraught period of American history that gives it a larger-than-life feel. At the center of the yarn is Onion (played by Joshua Caleb Johnson), a fictional enslaved young man who crosses paths with the infamous abolitionist John Brown (a scraggly, bearded Ethan Hawke), and goes on to change the course of history.