By H. Alan Scott
Senior Editor
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As the United States celebrates the 250th anniversary of the founding of the country, a new film is ready to show a portion of the life of President George Washington we’ve never seen before. Young Washington depicts his early years, far removed from where he would ultimately end up, but full of insight into the man who would become the first president and largely set the standard for what it means to be a great American.
Director Jon Erwin became obsessed with Washington’s story long before cameras rolled. “I was hooked on the story of the American Revolution, and there was so much I didn’t know about it,” Erwin told Newsweek. “I found it to be this unlikely miracle that this kind of American experiment worked.”
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That fascination led him to the question at the heart of the film: Where does a mythic father of a country come from? “I discovered this hero’s journey, this adventure in the early part of his life where he was forged—as many great characters are—in hardship and failure and the blood, sweat and tears,” Erwin says. “I found it so fascinating that this story was untold.”
In telling it, Erwin actually looked to a Brit to get into the headspace of one of America’s founding fathers. William Franklyn-Miller, 22, tackled the role from a place of curiosity, using his outsiderness to enhance, rather than diminish, the myth. “I think if I were American and I was born and raised here, the bar would be so high that I think I’d actually frighten myself off the character a little bit,” Franklyn-Miller says. He anchored himself in Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior, a book Washington studied as a young man. “What was really important to me was his mentality and his ambitions, his values and where he got them from,” he says. And while the film celebrates Washington’s accomplishments, it doesn’t spare his failures. “This film brings the humanity to such a legendary figure,” he adds.
This is Franklyn-Miller’s first major role, and he felt the weight of playing such an iconic figure alongside giants like Ben Kingsley and Kelsey Grammer. “It was probably one of the scariest moments of my life, walking into a room and acting with these legends,” he admits. But that nervousness served the performance. “George is a lesser rank than these men, so that nervousness is really what George would have been going through at the time as well.”
For his part, Grammer sees the film as a timely reintroduction to American greatness, saying he is “thrilled to be part of hopefully lighting the same fire [for American history] that was lit in my heart when I was a boy.” And Kingsley, drawing on a career built on universal human stories, puts it simply: “What the audience will see is, ‘My goodness, he [Washington] was one of us.’” Young Washington is a birthday ode to the country, celebrating the spirit of a man who continues to define the characteristics we look for in our presidents.
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