Hollywood’s heinous plan to cast Julia Roberts as Harriet Tubman: “No one is going to know”
An actor’s job is to disappear into a character and convince an audience that they’re watching a real person, not a celebrity playing one. However, an executive suggesting Julia Roberts as Harriet Tubman is several steps beyond Hollywood’s most egregious what-the-fuckery.
A biopic about the life, legacy, and impact made by Tubman, an indelible figure in American history who escaped from slavery and dedicated herself to rescuing others from a similar predicament using the Underground Railroad before becoming a women’s suffrage activist, first entered development in the early 1990s.
Her story was one of the most remarkable that hadn’t yet been given the full-blown industry biopic, but Gregory Allen Howard was determined to make it a reality. Try as he might, though, the screenwriter felt like banging his head against a brick wall whenever he found himself in the same room as the people with the power to give it the green light.
Of course, it’s no secret that the movie business has a long and unsavoury history of whitewashing, but casting the actor dubbed as ‘America’s Sweetheart’ who was best known for her megawatt smile and effervescent charisma as the face of the modern rom-com as Tubman has got to be one of the worst suggestions ever spoken out loud at any studio, ever.
Speaking to Focus Features, who distributed Howard’s long-gestating passion project when it was finally released in cinemas in November 2019, where it recouped its production budget more than twice over at the box office and earned Cynthia Erivo an Academy Award nomination for ‘Best Actress’ in the title role, he revealed that for the longest time, nobody with influence was interested in Harriet.
“When I got into the business, I wanted to tell these historical stories by turning them into entertainment,” he explained. “I didn’t want to give history lessons. I wanted to turn Harriet Tubman’s life, which I’d studied in college, into an action-adventure movie. The climate in Hollywood, however, was very different back then.”
That would be an understatement of epic, offensive, and blatantly racist proportions, based on what came next: “I was told how one studio head said in a meeting, ‘This script is fantastic. Let’s get Julia Roberts to play Harriet Tubman,'” Howard recalled. “When someone pointed out that Roberts couldn’t be Harriet, the executive responded, ‘It was so long ago. No one is going to know the difference.'”
Not to put too fine a point on it, but Jesus fucking Christ. There are head-scratching conversations that happen behind closed doors at a boardroom level, and then there’s whatever the hell this was. Has there ever been a worse casting suggestion in cinema history? Hopefully not, because Roberts as Tubman will take some beating.
Seeing as there was some backlash to Erivo’s hiring, based on a British actor of Nigerian descent playing one of the most important figures in American civil rights, imagining the reaction if the boneheaded Disney exec had gotten his way and pushed for Roberts doesn’t even bear thinking about.
