Scott Bakula on playing Lincoln: ‘The timing made a lot of sense to me’

Scott Bakula has just finished a noon student matinee. The audience included fidgety fourth graders (aged nine or 10). “They can be very challenging and this piece I wouldn’t say is necessarily kid friendly,” he says by phone. “But they did pretty well.”

Then he reflects: “You always know that in the midst of that group of kids, regardless of how some are not great at behaving and sitting – and I don’t blame them necessarily – a show strikes a chord in some children. That’s all you need. That gets you through it. You know there are kids that are glued to it and you do the work for them.”

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Bakula is starring in Mister Lincoln, a one-man show about the 16th US president, at Ford’s Theatre – which, poignantly, is the venue in Washington DC where Lincoln was shot and mortally wounded after prevailing in the civil war in 1865. And there are more ghosts for the affable 69-year-old actor to compete with: past portrayals of Lincoln by everyone from Henry Fonda to Hal Holbrook to Daniel Day-Lewis.

It represents a gear change for Bakula, best known for TV roles such as the time travelling Dr Samuel Beckett in Quantum Leap, Captain Jonathan Archer in Star Trek: Enterprise and Special Agent Dwayne Pride in NCIS: New Orleans. But he has always been “a big Lincoln fan” and felt the piquancy of playing Lincoln a month before a bitterly divided country goes to the polls.

He says: “The timing to do this kind of piece in front of the election made a lot of sense and was intriguing to me – to see if we could mount a show like this in the climate that we’re in now. And get people to come see it for a fresh perspective on not only Lincoln but on history and history repeating itself and the many similarities that exist between the Lincoln times and the times today in our country.”

In a partisan nation where even Taylor Swift and Christmas have become politicised, Lincoln is one of the few figures who remain transcendent, admired and claimed by both major parties. Republicans point out he was one of their own; Democrats now see him embodying their values. When rehearsals began for Mister Lincoln, the director, José Carrasquillo, noted that Lincoln was the only president named more than once at both the Republican and Democratic national conventions this summer.

Bakula reflects: “It’s fascinating, his struggles as a president, what he was going through as a human being. There’s so many similarities to what we’re going through, not to the point of civil war but being in a divided country and being with voters who are split minded. He was faced with all of that and way more. Every day I learn more and more about him and every night in the show I learn more and more about him.”

For Bakula there are particular parallels with Joe Biden, who spent more than half a century on the national political stage then, in July, made the selfless decision to step aside for the sake of party and country. “Lincoln was a self-made man and came out of nowhere but he had strong convictions and he put country and the constitution before himself,” he continues. “I feel that Biden has done that his whole life.

“Joe has made a career out of working with other people on his team and without. Lincoln famously – crazily to me – filled his cabinet with people who were on the other side, who had different opinions, who he ran against. He thrived on hearing the opinions of other people and getting both sides of the story and desperately trying to work with anybody that would come and meet him anywhere near halfway so he could keep things together as long as he could.

“I can’t imagine taking over the presidency and you have one state who’s already seceded day one. He wrestled with a lot of things and found a way to walk the tightrope for a long time, even during the war, keeping the union together. He worked and worked and selflessly and I feel that’s Joe’s thing. He never felt like he wanted to be famous but he wanted to do a good job for the people.”

An ardent theatregoer, Lincoln chose to celebrate the Union’s victory in the civil war in April 1865 by attending the comedy Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theatre. John Wilkes Booth, an actor and Confederate sympathiser, slipped into the president’s box and shot Lincoln with a Deringer pistol (now on display in a museum beneath the theatre). Booth fled into the night and Lincoln died the following morning.

Bakula reflects: “Had he lived who knows where we would be today in terms of the progress that we might have made coming out of the civil war. But by losing him and the chaos that ensued, we are where we are.”

Ford’s went dark for more than a century, then reopened as a working theatre in 1968 with a detailed reconstruction of the presidential box (the original was removed a few months after Lincoln’s death). The box is kept empty and is a brooding presence during performances. The theatre has a longstanding position of discouraging dramatic re-enactments of the assassination (its website has a post headlined, “Why Ford’s Theatre Doesn’t Stage Assassination Re-enactments”).

Mister Lincoln, written by Herbert Mitgang, was first performed at the theatre by Roy Dotrice in 1980. The play explores Lincoln as both person and politician and includes recitations of the Emancipation Proclamation and Gettysburg Address – words so celebrated that, for an actor, it it like trying to compete with audience memories of “To be or not to be”.

Bakula says: “They’re magnificent words and they’re so well crafted and there’s so much terror that you’re going to somehow mess them up. I joked with somebody the other day: look, Lincoln was a human being also, he wasn’t a robot, so when he would he give speeches odds are he would make a mistake and not say exactly what he wanted to say.

“These are things that he has written down and whether he said them exactly that way on the day, who knows? Those are the little lies that I tell myself so that I’m not totally freaked out every time I’m saying these iconic words.”

But this is more than a theatrical version of the marble and granite Lincoln Memorial. “It’s much more about his personal life, about his journey as a young man, about his relationship in various stages with Mary and his own relationship with depression and melancholia and his own state of mind and his relationships with his cabinet.

“I don’t know what people are expecting when they come into the theatre but it goes in a different direction and explores the human – darker side, almost – of who he was as a person and how he survived the pressures and the fears and the sadness and the loss and the weight of bringing up the militia to defend the Union against the Confederacy and the over a half million men who died during the war.

“It weighed on him. He aged dramatically, as all of our leaders seem to do when they get into office. And then it ends tragically also.”

The son of a lawyer and schoolteacher, Bakula grew up in St Louis, Missouri. Once he was among those children sitting in a theatre audience spellbound what he was unfolding on stage.

“I can remember being in the theatre in my very young teens and being overwhelmed by the whole thing – in a good way,” he says. “I grew up as a musical theatre kid. I sang, I had a band, I did all that kind of stuff. I loved to perform but I never thought of it as an option. I didn’t dream that big when I was a kid but I knew that I loved it.”

In his 20s, however, Bakula decided to pursue his passion and move to New York. “I’m glad I made that decision. That’s the things you do when you’re young. I look back on it and think I could never do that now – just pack up and go someplace I’d never been before and try and start a brand new career with not knowing a soul. But that’s what you do when you’re a young person and thank goodness for the ignorance of youth.”

He never intended to be a TV star but “fell into it”, he recalls. Bakula became known to millions of viewers of Quantum Leap playing Sam Beckett, a physicist who, after creating a time travel experiment that goes awry, finds himself “leaping” into the bodies of different people through history and fixing their problems. A 2022 reboot, starring Raymond Lee, was set 30 years after the original.

Bakula says: “It was a great experience for me and I love how deeply it affected people all over the planet. There’s nowhere to go where people haven’t seen Quantum Leap. Most people have fond memories of it and, because of the kind of show it was, so many people have memories of watching it with their family.

“That to me is so touching because that’s not really happening that much anymore: that idea of let’s all sit down and watch Quantum Leap tonight or The Wonderful World of Disney or All in the Family or Cheers or anything more modern.

“People are watching their own things in their hands with their phones or laptops so you don’t have that communal nature of, ‘I loved watching Quantum Leap, my grandpa and I, we watched that every week.’ I love those kind of stories when they could share that time together.”

Bakula went on to take the captain’s chair in Star Trek: Enterprise, a prequel series set a hundred years before Captain Kirk and Mr Spock. He recalls: “It was a blast. It was a great privilege. The icing on the cake is to get to know [William] Shatner and Patrick [Stewart] and and Kate [Mulgrew] and everybody.

“They’re all really fun and different people. There’s a burden in that sci-fi fans have a very high standard. If they don’t like you then it’s not good but, when they do embrace you, it’s a lovely marriage.”

He admits: “There were a lot of challenges with it. We had a theme song that was different and some people hated that. I had a dog and some people hated that. People are very possessive about their their experiences within sci-fi and they like a certain captain or they like a certain Doctor Who. ‘I don’t like that Doctor Who, the next person I don’t like, I’m not gonna watch it,’ whatever. You have to be willing to tough some of that stuff out but overall that was another great experience and continues to this day.”

But for all his TV work, Bakula has theatre running through his veins. This year he starred in The Connector, a new musical off Broadway, and Man of La Mancha in New Hampshire. With Mister Lincoln at Ford’s to boot, he feels like he is coming home. “I may not have been doing a lot of theatre,” he muses, “but I started in the theatre and I’m going to end in the theatre.”

• Mister Lincoln is playing at Ford’s Theatre in Washington DC until 13 October