‘Sons Of Liberty’: Ben Barnes Talks Taking On Samuel Adams In History Mini-Series

History’s “Sons of Liberty” kicks off on Sunday night with a spirited retelling of the build up to the American Revolution.

It’s Ben Barnes character, Samuel Adams, who is viewers’ entryway into the piece, as the story opens with the Redcoats on the hunt for Adams, a man who has financially shorted the Crown. His failure to bring in a sizable sum as a tax collector has made him beloved by the people, who protect the Founding Father-in-the-making from the British soldiers chasing him at the start of this new three-night mini-series on History.

“You meet him in a pub and obviously, there’s a Sam Adams beer, so you expect him to be a heavy drinker, and you know, [he] is kind of drinking away his misery, but he’s also this kind of Robin Hood type character in that he was a tax collector and defaulted on payments on behalf of the community and took that burden on himself,” Ben told Access Hollywood. “He was a kind of wanted figure for that reason, and obviously, in our telling of our story, he’s gonna be chased across the rooftops for it.”

While the series is filled with action and adventure, these are rebels with a cause.

“To go from that to a man who is giving a speech about the nature of hearty themes like freedom and what it means to be a man and a citizen — to make that leap in six hours — was really kind of an interesting, interesting challenge,” Ben said. “It was sort of beautifully done on the page and the writers were very, very open to kind of talking through that kind of character arc with me and really letting me be involved with it, which was — that was kind of one of the really thrilling elements of being away in the bubble in Romania for four months with only this to focus on. It’s very intense.”

WATCH: History Channel’s ‘Sons Of Liberty’ (First Look)

One of the most interesting relationships that develops as the piece unfolds is the one between Sam Adams and the wealthy John Hancock, played by Rafe Spall. With Adams being chased for the tax money, an opportunity opens up for Hancock to make a proposal – he’ll pay off Adams’ debt if Adams uses his influence to stop rioting in Boston. A twist involving another figure sets up an unlikely friendship between the two men from different backgrounds, and really starts to sow the seeds of the revolution.

“How their relationship develops was really lovely, I think, and it’s very exciting to act opposite [Rafe] because he never does the same thing twice. He was playing this character… with a core of iron, but this kind of like butterfly exterior and the first scene [I had] with him, I forgot my lines… and I almost never do that, but I just realized I was just watching him kind of land and take off again. But then, once you get into that rhythm with each other, you start bouncing off each other and realizing that you can use the differences between your characters to kind of fence with each other essentially, verbally anyway, and that’s what I really enjoyed most, I think,” Ben said.

While he had some knowledge of the historical figures portrayed in “Sons of Liberty” prior to the project – Sam and John Adams (played by Henry Thomas), Hancock, Benjamin Franklin (Dean Norris), Paul Revere (Michael Raymond James) and George Washington (Jason O’Mara) – finding out the intricacies of how they “worked together as a kind of Justice League, power force kind of unit,” made it “exciting” as he read the scripts, Ben said.

To inform his performance as Sam, Ben said he bought a book on the historical figure, listened to some on tape, and occasionally turned to the Internet.

“I hit the Wikipedia actually, half way through reading it thinking, ‘This can’t be all true, can it?’ So I hit the Wikipedia between Episodes 2 and 3, I think, when I was reading it at home. It took me about six hours to read them all because I kept looking things up,” he said.

“Sons of Liberty” borrows from history, but History officially calls it a dramatic interpretation.

“So much of storytelling is about who’s doing the telling and why you’re telling the story now and who you’re telling it for and I think that there have been some quite kind of earnest and detailed adaptations of this time period over the years,” Ben said.

“It’s obviously the History channel so there’s a sort of bent on trying to be accurate and tell the truth, but at the same time… they’re moving into their dramatizing, and they want to tell the kind of really fun, exciting, visceral rough and tumble… magnetic version of this story with characters, which are rounded, real people, and that’s what they’re trying to do with this miniseries,” he added

Free time during filming in Romania wasn’t plentiful for Ben, who is in many of the mini-series’ scenes, but he did get some quality moments with his fellow Founding Father-playing actors.

“It was very, very hot, so… six days of the week, we would be battling in thick cotton and leather and on horses and then, on Sunday, we would be in our trunks, in the pool all just chatting, which was like a fantastic dream scenario really. Work hard and then kind of relax hard,” Ben said. “And there was quite a lot of beer drinking. Especially when you’ve got a cast that’s all men as well, it becomes very drink-y.”

“Sons of Liberty” begins on Sunday, January 25 at 9 PM ET/PT, and continues on Monday and Tuesday, also at 9 PM, on History.

— Jolie Lash