 Photos: HBO, Getty Images Before Lin-Manuel Miranda reimagined Alexander Hamilton’s life story as a magnum opus of musical theatre, Rufus Sewell was the man responsible for keeping the Founding Father’s legacy alive in the 21st century. You see, Sewell played Hamilton in HBO’s epic John Adams miniseries. We got a chance to sit down with The Man In The High Castle star recently and we just had to ask how he felt about Hamilton‘s explosion. Not only does Manuel’s interpretation now supersede Sewell’s, but those tense cabinet disagreements with Thomas Jefferson are a lot more lively when imagined as rap battles. For example, here is the scene from John Adams where Sewell’s Hamilton is debating with Thomas Jefferson (Stephen Dillane) about establishing a centralized national bank: Meanwhile, here’s how that exact cabinet meeting plays out in Hamilton:
He added: “Yeah, I was a little jealous that I couldn’t have played more of Alexander Hamilton in John Adams! When I accepted the part, I didn’t know how small the part was going to be.” Sewell also explained why he felt the miniseries gave a “misrepresentation” of Hamilton as a character. “I went off like a fool and read everything I could about Alexander Hamilton and I had all this stuff! ‘Could you put this in? Could you put that in? Could you put this in!?!’ Because he was a fascinating character!” As it happens, Hamilton only appears in two episodes of John Adams and is positioned as more of a greedy schemer than a tireless worker bent on stabilizing the young American nation. Sewell hasn’t yet gotten a chance to see the sold-out show, so we tried to boost his spirits by letting him know that John Adams is hardly in the musical Hamilton. “Yeah, well, good!” he said with a laugh. Rufus Sewell is currently starring as a character he calls the “Nazi Atticus Finch” on The Man in the High Castle. You can watch the pilot for free now, but the full season debuts on Prime Video on Friday, November 20. Click here for more of Decider’s The Man in the High Castle coverage. [Watch The Man In The High Castle on Prime Video] John Adams is available to stream on a variety of platforms including Prime Video, HBO Now, or HBO Go. [Watch John Adams on Prime Video] RELATED: Decider’s Ultimate Online Guide To Broadway’s Hamilton
Despite not appearing on stage, John Adams is hated by Lin-Manuel Miranda's Alexander Hamilton, as the musical dramatizes their rivalry for Broadway. In Lin-Manuel Miranda's Hamilton, Alexander Hamilton is depicted as an ambitious, fiery character with a particular hatred for John Adams, the second president of the United States. Hamilton was created by Lin-Manuel Miranda, also known for Moana and Encanto, who was inspired by Ron Chernow's 2004 biography of Alexander Hamilton to create the musical. The stage production began in 2015 in New York City and was successful in its own right, but its popularity grew when Disney+ released a filmed version of the Broadway show in July 2020. The musical retells the early history of the USA through the life of Alexander Hamilton as one of the country's Founding Fathers. Although Hamilton is largely historically accurate, Miranda made some changes, including Lafayette's backstory, to make Hamilton suitable for the stage. So was Hamilton's relationship with John Adams really as bad as the show made out? John Adams does not physically feature in Hamilton, but he is mentioned throughout the second act. He is first referenced in the song "Take A Break" when Hamilton jokes that John Adams takes so many vacations because he doesn't have a real job. The job in question is Adams' role as vice president to George Washington from 1789 to 1797. At the time the position didn't have much responsibility and Adams got the job by coming second in the election - unlike today where the president's running mate assumes the position. Hamilton, played by creator Lin-Manual Miranda, worked to ensure Adams lost the first election by convincing enough electoral voters not to vote for him, despite the two being in the Federalist party together. Naturally, this annoyed Adams, and with Washington in the top job, Hamilton became the Secretary of the Treasury. Later in the second act, after the retirement of George Washington as president, the rivalry between Adams and Hamilton heats up in the song "The Adams Administration." Set in 1797, Adams, to the surprise of King George, becomes the second president of the US and fires Hamilton from his position as Secretary of the Treasury. Whilst this quickly creates tension between the characters, this is one of Hamilton's biggest historical inaccuracies. Hamilton had resigned from the position in 1794, way before Adams became president. Adams did make an effort to keep Hamilton's influence to a minimum though, but ultimately Hamilton's reputation made him too important to keep out of the political circle when the US got caught up in the British and French war. In "The Adams Administration," Adams refers to Hamilton as a "creole bastard." Whilst there is no conclusive evidence that this specific slur was used, Adams did have a track record of insulting Hamilton by referring to him as a "bastard Bratt of a Scotch Pedlar." In the show, Hamilton fires right back and calls Adams "a fat mother-BLEEP." Whilst events obviously didn't happen quite this way, originally Hamilton's response was a much longer rap, but it was one of the songs that did not make the final Hamilton cut. The rap described a letter that Hamilton published ahead of the 1800 presidential election where Adams was hoping to be re-elected. Hamilton's letter described Adams as someone with "great and intrinsic defects in his character," which made him unfit for office. Still, despite some creative rewriting of history, Hamilton handles the Hamilton-Adams rivalry well.
When John Adams premiered on HBO in 2008 — 10 years ago to this day — the cable network was stuck in an identity crisis. The Sopranos and Six Feet Under had finished their celebrated runs, hyped series such as David Milch’s infamous surfing drama John from Cincinnati were bombing, and the dawn of Peak TV was still on the horizon. That year’s Emmys would mark the first time a basic cable show won Outstanding Drama Series, for AMC’s Mad Men, ever. HBO, the dominant prestige player on the market for a full decade, was struggling to stay fresh. Not so much a groundbreaker, John Adams now represents the kind of hammy premium cable miniseries that HBO has (mostly) done away with. The show’s ratings were strong, it received great reviews, and it’d go on to win a mammoth 13 Emmy Awards as well as every Golden Globe for which it was nominated. HBO’s direction, in step with the rest of TV and the advent of the “limited” series, has since changed, pushing flashier fare like Big Little Lies and The Night Of. But John Adams deserves a closer look than the trend might suggest: The sweep of the production — spanning more than 50 years and built on a $100 million budget — is undeniable. Its chief artistic value, however, is smaller in scale: bringing a valorized historical icon — a “Founding Father” — down to a thrillingly human level. In that sense, the show’s legacy is comparable to the musical Hamilton. Premiering at the Public in 2015, it too arrived when its medium was in the midst of a pivotal transformation, moving toward edgier fare and simultaneously reviving the definition of a great musical. (“I was quite depressed about the state of the musical maybe five years ago,” Andrew Lloyd Webber recently told EW. “But now I’m seeing what Lin [-Manuel Miranda] is doing with Hamilton … and I’m so thrilled to see that melody is in fashion again.”) Hamilton has resonated because of the way Miranda presents Alexander Hamilton, in all of his arrogance, intelligence, and complexity. As the mastermind himself put it: “The notion of our Founders being these perfect men who got these stone tablets from the sky that became our Constitution and Bill of Rights is bulls–t.” The difference in impact between Hamilton and John Adams is stark: One has emerged as a cultural landmark, and helped revive an entire creative form; the other foreshadowed its style’s steady decline. And yet both are faithfully based on definitive biographies of their respective subjects, capturing the spirit of the men to the best of their ability. John Adams shows the second U.S. president to be vain, stubborn, passionate about justice, and committed to the tenets of democracy. (Not for nothing, it also features a pre-Hamilton Hamilton, played by Rufus Sewell.) Given how folkloric the Founding Fathers still exist within pop culture and the historical imagination, that’s a fairly radical portrayal. And it’s one that bears striking similarities to Hamilton’s. That’s also to say nothing of Paul Giamatti’s naturalistic performance as Adams, the kind you rarely find in period dramas across any medium. Late in the first John Adams episode, the eponymous character makes a speech accepting his nomination to the First Continental Congress. It’s a triumphant, exciting moment, but Giamatti plays it so subtly, so touchingly, that it feels slightly out of place in the stately production — it has a level of humanity and surprise that’d almost fit better in a riskier contemporary take on the man. His turn is also comparable to Miranda’s Hamilton; the writer-actor brings every element of his fascination with Hamilton to his performance (musical and not), smartly fusing insecurity to ego. Perhaps most fascinating is how Hamilton — with its brilliant raps and stunning setpieces — maximized the potential of theater in its portrait of a historical icon, just as John Adams maximized the potential of longform television in the same effort. Writer Kirk Ellis uses seven hour-plus installments to scrupulously detail his subject; Giamatti gradually unpeels Adams’ layers with a masterly touch; and director Tom Hooper tells the story in elegant, unobtrusive visual terms. John Adams may not have been a sexy earth-shaker like Hamilton, but it was equally invested in bringing nuance and flaws to a man typically thought of mythically, or at least simplistically. In that sense, they’re companion pieces, unique historical dramas in conversation. Of course, before Hamilton and John Adams, there was 1776, the 1969 Broadway musical (and later a movie-musical). Adams is central to this entertainingly comic take on the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and he’s depicted more cartoonishly — an “obnoxious and disliked” person, as the show’s refrain goes, a characterization which Adams biographer David McCullough (whose book formed the basis for the HBO mini) has since called inaccurate. It’s no Hamilton, but the show has lasted: It’s been successfully revived on Broadway and continues to be performed in regional theaters around the country. The legacy of HBO’s John Adams, now at its 10th anniversary, exists somewhere between those two Founding Father musicals — with character depth of a Hamilton-esque modern quality, but a stodgy style that’s firmly past its expiration date. Such a handsome but stiff miniseries would be met with indifference in 2018; most of those 13 Emmys would probably be split between, say, the thematically sharp Big Little Lies, the cinematic Fargo, the presciently historical American Crime Story, and so on. And yet: John Adams has more in common with Hamilton, and more to do with what led to that musical sensation, than it gets credit for. It’s both outdated and ahead of its time. Let’s consider John Adams’ legacy a complicated one, then: a marker of the end of an era in the prestige TV game, but a rousing early indicator of how pop culture — culminating in the phenomenon that is Hamilton — could enhance the way we view the past.
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