AMC’s latest drama “Turn” takes place during the American Revolution. Abe Woodhull (Jamie Bell) joins the Culper Spy Ring to serve George Washington in the espionage that led to independence from Britain.
The leader of the Culper Ring was Ben Tallmadge, who is played on “Turn” by Seth Numrich, a theater actor from New York. During a lunch break from AMC’s presentation to the Television Critics Association earlier this year, I got to sit down with Numrich to learn about Tallmadge and his role on “Turn.”
CraveOnline: Tell us about your role on “Turn.”
Seth Numrich: My role, I get to play a guy who’s named Benjamin Tallmadge, who was a real guy, who was a soldier, a captain and then a major… so an officer of the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War. He basically had the task of the ringleader of the Culper Spy Ring. He was sort of the person who put it all together.
Ben Tallmadge grew up on Long Island in a place called Setauket which all of our main characters are from. All of the American characters of the show grew up there. We all grew up together and when Ben was charged with the task of gathering intelligence, he went back to his oldest, closest friends from the place where he grew up, and those were the people he employed to be his spy operatives. That’s where I fit into the whole story.
Since Ben Tallmadge was a real person, did any of the research you may have done conflict with anything that was written in the script?
You know, there are little things. There are things they needed to take artistic license to make more dramatically accessible. But for the most part the things that I’ve read, even if they don’t necessarily specifically correspond to the actual history, it’s all incredibly useful, getting perspective and information about who this guy was. I was able to read, Ben Tallmadge wrote a memoir late in his life, an actual autobiography of his life.
So that was one thing I went to immediately when I discovered it, but then read the whole thing and realized there wasn’t a single mention of spying or of gathering intelligence, any of that because all of it was still deeply classified, even well after the war when Tallmadge was an older man. A lot of that information stayed top secret until well into the 20th century when historians began uncovering it.
There were certain things I could read that would give me some information about who the guy was but then getting the actual meat of the information of what he did and how much of truly an American hero he was that a lot of people don’t know about, that was a little bit more difficult. I relied on people like Alex Rose who wrote the book Washington’s Spies that a lot of our stuff is based on, to learn more about those efforts and really how much of an impact he had on the war.
What’s an example of a particularly useful piece of Ben Tallmadge information?
For me, a big part of it was learning about the events that led up to beginning the Culper Ring. So when Ben first joined the army, he had an older brother who was also a soldier in the army. There was a big huge battle called The Battle of Brooklyn which was one of the places where the British really took the upper hand early on in the war. Ben was in a group of soldiers that was not deployed to the battlefield, but his brother was and his brother was killed in that battle. So imagining what that would have been like for Ben, positioned in a place where he could see the battle going on but couldn’t participate and then learning later that his brother had been killed there, I think that was something that really fueled his passion.
Then just shortly after that, a guy named Nathan Hale, who is sort of the spy that people might know about from history books, was the first spy caught and hanged for treason by the British. Nathan Hale was a very close friend of Tallmadge’s. They went to Yale together and even acted in plays together and were very close. That would’ve been another huge blow to Ben, learning that his best friend had been killed and was a big part of what spurred him on to try to pick up that baton and keep running and make an effort to make a difference in the war. Learning about those things about where Ben is coming from when our series begins was extraordinarily helpful.
The pilot is obviously about how Abe gets involved in the Culper Ring. Where does it go from there?
So many places. Part of what’s great about the show is that the story is so multifaceted and there are so many characters that are intertwined and interwoven. For my character, the natural progression is setting up these efforts of gathering intelligence and then figuring out how to use that intelligence. Particularly figuring out, for Ben, how to convince his superiors that the information was useful and that the spying efforts were a good idea. He’s trying to convince his superiors that I’m doing this, I’m getting this intelligence and first of all we need to trust it, second of all we need to use it. We need to launch military campaigns based on this information.
That’s a difficult challenge for Ben in the first couple of episodes. With any story like this, what’s exciting is the challenges that come up along the way that are unexpected. Running into obstacles that Ben and Abe and Caleb couldn’t have seen coming, and then the audience gets to watch how they deal with that and figure it out. So there’s a lot of fun stuff like that.
Did Tallmadge ever interact directly with George Washington?
Yeah, oh, quite a bit. There were a lot of letters sent back and forth between them. More than likely they would have ended up in the same places pretty frequently. So they no doubt would have had meetings together, met in person and discussed these things. It’s hard to know that through history, but there are a multitude of letters exchanged back and forth between them.
Ben Tallmadge was responsible for creating the codes with which they would correspond. So Ben would write a code book and basically issue one to everyone who needed one, and then the letters that went back and forth were coded. You would need the book in order to know what was being said, so that went between Washington and Abe Woodhull and Tallmadge and some of the other spies.
Like the copper plates they place over the letters?
Exactly, that was one version of a technique that they used. Another would be replacing words with numbers, so each of the Culper members had a number that meant things. We also had code names. The name Culper comes from Abe Woodhull’s spy alias was Samuel Culper, but his number alias was 722. My alias was 721. Washington was 711. So we had these different ways of encoding and keeping the information secret in case it was intercepted by the enemy.
Those copper plates really interested me. Did they make a set and distribute them amongst each other to send them back and forth?
Exactly, they would do that, but same with the codebooks, those things would have to change frequently because if anyone ever got ahold of one of them, then the whole system was compromised. So every few months, Ben was creating a whole new codebook of new numbers or a new template for them to cut out of what words were used just in case anything were to be intercepted.
It must have been hard to come up with an innocuous sounding letter that would match up to those tablets.
Yeah, it was really difficult. What’s interesting to me about learning about this time period and these spy efforts is how much they were able to accomplish with very little resources. Nowadays, you think of spies, you think of James Bond having every gadget you can imagine and money and cars, whatever he needs to get the job done, he’s got it there at his fingertips.
These guys, there was barely money to pay them for their efforts so they certainly weren’t using any high tech means of spying. It was all relying on these very low tech and very unsophisticated methods but getting the most sophisticated results that they could out of them. It’s fun to watch that as well on the series and how those techniques developed.
Did you ever as a kid, or even more recently, go to historical parks like Colonial Williamsburg?
Yeah, I’ve not been to Colonial Williamsburg yet although where we’re filming is quite close to there, so I hope to make a trip out there at some point. Yeah, it’s something that ever since I was a little kid has always fascinated me, going to those types of things. I’ve always been really interested in history so getting to work on a job like this is sort of a dream come true.
When there was an audition for a new AMC show, how much weight was on that given the potential of their past shows?
For me, some. Obviously I had heard about “Breaking Bad” and “Mad Men” and known that those shows had been very successful. There’s obviously the excitement about the potential of working at a place that’s clearly done good work. Beyond that, my real response was just to the script. I thought it was so smart and so well written and fully realized and the characters were real people. I thought that any network that’s interested in producing a show like this, because it’s not necessarily a sure thing.
There’s nothing like it on television as far as I know. There’s not really a precedent for this type of show yet so I think that they’re taking a big risk in terms of producing something like this and I have a lot of respect for that. A network that’s going to take those risks and put in the resources into making it really great, which so far my experience on set, they’ve been doing that. They’ve been really interested in the highest quality and really letting us, as the artists involved in creating the show, letting us work and letting us create and giving us free reign to run with it. That’s really all you can ask for as an actor.
