Anti-slavery activist John Brown figures in this film and is seen in silhouette in a jail cell in one scene. Raymond Massey, who plays Junius Brutus Booth, played Brown in Santa Fe Trail (1940), the same year he played Abraham Lincoln in Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1940). He also played Brown in Seven Angry Men (1955), which was made the same year as this film. In real life, John Wilkes Booth was a witness at the 1859 hanging of John Brown.
The film was meant to star Marlon Brando. He wanted a study of Edwin's tragic life (a career ruined by the assassination), not clips of classical plays. Brando later said, "When Fox couldn't get a top-rate actor like Laurence Olivier or me, they settled for . . . a third -rate performer with even worse skin."
Raymond Massey plays Junius Brutus Booth, father of John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of Abraham Lincoln. Massey himself played Lincoln in Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1940) and How the West Was Won (1962). Additionally, Ian Keith, who appears as the Ghost of Hamlet's Father in a "Hamlet" scene, played Booth in D.W. Griffith's film, Abraham Lincoln (1930).
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