Last night, the 29-year-old Irish actor Anthony Boyle shape-shifted from Major Harry Crosby, a clean-cut American war hero, to John Wilkes Booth, the American actor turned assassin. The transformation happened at midnight, when Apple TV+ simultaneously released the season finale of Masters of the Air—Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg’s World War II drama based on the American 100th bomb group, which is narrated by Boyle’s character—and the premiere of Manhunt, a conspiracy thriller about Abraham Lincoln’s assassination.
“Crosby was somebody who was motivated by love and had so much goodness in him and was quite nervous,” Boyle tells me. “Booth was motivated by evil, he was very confident, and he was an asshole. He was the direct antithesis of Crosby.”
Boyle taped his audition to play Booth while on the set of Masters of the Air, on the outskirts of London. He was clean-shaven and wearing his air-force costume. “I looked like Harry auditioning for John—which was probably a headfuck for the [Manhunt] producers.”
What seems like more of a “headfuck” is how he, an Irishman, seamlessly transitioned from Major Crosby’s chipper, all-American cadence to Booth’s pompous Southern drawl. But Boyle says American accents are easy for him to imitate because of all the American media he consumed growing up in Belfast.
“John Wilkes Booth was motivated by evil, he was very confident, and he was an asshole.”
Before leaving home for drama school in Wales when he was 17, Boyle spent his high-school days at De La Salle College, in Belfast, being chastised by teachers and googling audition listings in his spare time. “Teachers were constantly saying, ‘You need to learn your times tables,’ and that sort of thing, but I just never really paid any mind to it because I always had this one track: becoming an actor.”
During his third year at the Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama, Boyle was cast as Scorpius Malfoy in the West End production of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. Because the Malfoy family held pure-blooded wizards in higher esteem than mudbloods, he researched purebred pugs online. “They all have shortened larynxes and heavy breathing because of inbreeding,” he explains. “So I gave [Scorpius] a kind of weird, scratchy voice.”
I ask Boyle if he approaches his screen roles the same way that he does his stage roles. “All my characters are based on dogs,” he says, laughing. “Major Crosby is a cocker spaniel.” Boyle’s sense of humor is reminiscent of the charming yet clumsy Crosby, who Boyle says is really more like a character out of an “Adam Sandler movie,” while the other characters “feel like cool soldiers from Band of Brothers.”
After Masters of the Air wrapped, in December 2021, Boyle spent the holidays in Belfast with his family. In the spring of 2022, he went to Savannah, Georgia, to shoot Manhunt, which tracks the chilling search for Booth following his killing of the president. Instead of learning how to mount a model of a B-17 bomber plane, he had to learn how to ride a horse—and grow a horseshoe-shaped mustache.
“I didn’t know much about Booth. When I was researching him, I learned he was one of the most famous actors of his time,” he says. “It would be like [Leonardo] DiCaprio shooting Joe Biden.”
Boyle has two more shows premiering later this year: In Shardlake, Disney’s new thriller based on the Tudor mystery novel, Boyle plays a 16th-century English henchman and investigator. Then, in FX’s Say Nothing, based on Patrick Radden Keefe’s best-selling book about the Troubles, Boyle plays an I.R.A. member in Northern Ireland.
“I think the opposite [role] of whatever I’ve just done is usually the most interesting for me,” he says. “I wouldn’t want to play the same sort of thing twice. Variety is the spice of life.”
Masters of the Air and Manhunt are available for streaming on Apple TV+
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Carolina de Armas is an Associate Editor at AIR MAIL