‘Warrior’ a fresh look at George Washington

George Washington has one of the most recognizable mugs on the planet. But what was inside that head?

The History Channel documentary “Washington the Warrior” attempts to answer this and other questions about the formative years of America’s first president in a two-hour special airing at 9 tonight.

“We all know the Washington on the dollar bill and Mt. Rushmore, and we know him as the president. But the more we started thinking about it, the more we realized that there is a vast undiscovered territory about Washington’s early life,” says Dolores Gavin, the History Channel’s director of historical programming.

“One battle at a time,” Gavin explains, the program follows “America’s first action hero” -- through his transformation from a brash young officer, nearly killed during the French and Indian War in the mid-1750s, into the wiser Revolutionary War hero of Yorktown in 1781.

“His gut instinct got him into a lot of trouble as a young man,” she adds, “but later he doesn’t go down the path of brash action. He thinks it through.”

The production is narrated by Stacy Keach, with Shea Patrick and Jackson Bolt portraying Washington at different stages of his military career. They do so without words, because, as Gavin explains, “We made the decision that we wanted deliberately to stay away from the spoken word. We wanted them to just forward the story.”

The battle sequences were shot in Lithuania, with about 1,500 reenactors participating.

“At one point, Jackson Bolt was the only person on the set, outside of the crew, who spoke English, so that was a bit of a challenge,” Gavin says. The solution: a translator with a bullhorn.

Although numerous historians were consulted, Gavin says a certain amount of speculation is inevitable in trying to fully understand the man.

She believes viewers no longer want their history “filtered from a dry textbook” that offers only one-dimensional portraits of historic figures and events.

“I think now we want to pull heroes close,” she says. “We want to see their humanness and their mistakes, and most importantly, how they learned from their mistakes, because then it feels like we know them.”