Copperhead: Bigfork's Brown featured in Civil War film

“It was the best acting experience I’ve ever had.”

With those words, Casey Brown reflected on Copperhead, a new movie that will make its premiere Friday in Gettysburg, Pa.

In the movie, Brown, 21, who grew up in Bigfork, played Jeff Beech, the son of abolitionist Abner Beech. Beech was a Copperhead, i.e. a Northern Democrat who opposed the Civil War, advocated peace and restoration of the Union, even if slavery continued.

“It’s sort of a perfect parable for our political system today,” Brown said.

Copperhead was directed by Ron Maxwell, who also directed Gettysburg (1993) and Gods and Generals (2003), and written by Bill Kauffman. The movie is Kauffman’s first screenplay, but he’s written numerous books, including “Forgotten Founder, Drunken Prophet,” which was about the life of anti-Federalist Luther Martin, a founding father who refused to sign the Constitution because he opposed a strong central government.

“What has remained unsaid, and what Civil War films never fully show, is that within each society, North and South, there were many, many factions,” Kauffman said in a press release. “You had Southerners with no interest in owning slaves, or seceding from the union. To the north, you had differences of opinion that were just as fractious, even violent. Not everybody who hated slavery or loved the U.S. Constitution was willing to send their children off to die or be maimed in a bloody battle against fellow Americans. That fascinating reality is the force driving Copperhead. If there’s a political point to the film, it’s the defense of dissent.

“Everyone says they’re in favor of dissent,” Kauffman added. “But you’re flattering an audience and falsifying history if you stack the deck so that all the right-thinking people of today already agree with your dissenter — if he or she alone is defending Darwin’s theory of evolution, say, or standing up to the mob that wants to hang the witches at Salem. It’s much harder, more truthful, and introduces more interesting complications if your protagonist is like Abner and opposes the very thing we now know that history has ratified: the war to uphold the United States and end slavery. It raises the moral question, not of slavery, but free speech: ‘OK, lovers of dissent: Are you going to defend this guy?’”

Copperhead is set in a small town in upstate New York and was filmed in a small town outside Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada.

“We were shooting in an amazing location all built before 1850,” Brown said. The cast rehearsed the movie for two weeks prior to production, which is unprecedented in the industry, he said. “A lot of the actors became my closest friends.”

Some of the actors include: Billy Campbell, Angus McFadyen, Peter Fonda, Augustus Prew, Lucy Boynton, Francois Arnaud, Josh Cruddas, Genevieve Steele, Andrea Lee Norwood, Hugh Thompson and Brian Downey.

This is Brown’s fourth movie, which was filmed from May through July last year. He and his family will be traveling to Gettysburg for Friday’s premiere.

Brown isn’t sure when Copperhead will show in northwest Montana, but he and his father, Tom Brown, are trying to coordinate a benefit in the Flathead Valley sometime in July.