Harriet Tubman: What took you so long?
Abraham Lincoln: Traffic was a bitch.
I liked the movie up to the point where Julia Tubman sold herself to that rich white guy. And then it became a Cinderella story.
I’m actually intrigued how one would go about writing a movie about Harriet Tubman without acknowledging her race. Talk about a tough job.
Not a massive gulf. The two groups overlap enough to give Uwe Boll a career.
Hey, it worked for Ghost in the Shell. :dubious:
Robert Downey, Jr, played a black GI in Tropic Thunder, so I guess it’s not … impossible. :dubious:
I actually thought that when I was about 8 years old, then I read some books on Civil War history and learned the truth =)
That would be interesting, and several white roles she could play.
Hey, he was just a dude playing a dude playing a dude.
The title of this thread makes it sound like Julia Roberts was cast and had accepted the role of Harriet Tubman, but just before filming began, she chose to not take the role, so it didn’t get made back in 1994. It’s much more likely that in the conversations in meetings where the screenwriter showed the script to various producers, one of them offhandedly suggested casting Roberts as Tubman, but that suggestion got ignored or ridiculed. Long before any movie gets made or almost gets made, there are lots of meetings with various film people, many of whom won’t have any connection with the movie that finally gets made (assuming that it ever gets made). Bizarre casting choices are often thrown around at these meetings. Read about the strange casting choices almost made for The Godfather:
Downey played a white actor playing a black character in a movie within the movie Tropic Thunder, and the point of casting him was to make fun of stupid casting choices.
So Harriet Tubman fighting a giant spider in the third act is out? 
Came here in hopes someone mentioned this. The pressure finally worked, you know.
No, it’s polar bears now.
Harriet Tubman: Demon Slayer
Link is to a sales site:
https://www.comixology.com/Harriet-Tubman-Demon-Slayer-1/digital-comic/513324
Or, as it was known at the time, the Tubway.
On the other hand, Linda Hunt won an Oscar for playing a man in The Year of Living Dangerously.
An actor is an actor. He or she shouldn’t *automatically *be excluded from any role because of race or gender.
I’m waiting for Muppet Harriet Tubman, with Miss Piggy in the title role.
Harriet Tubman’s life and historical narrative intrinsically revolves around her race and experiences as a black woman enslaved during 19th century USA. If one is going to do a movie about her and cast a white actor out of an idea of open casting, then it rightly follows that the film makers should do so with the ENTIRE CAST. Justly, every single role should be open in this way.
It’d result in an interesting retelling (that’s for sure) and it wouldn’t remove African-Americans from participating in retelling the story of one of America’s most famous black rights’ revolutionary. Altogether it’d be too much effort for a major film production company to try to pull off sensitively though. Such ideas are best left for indie film companies or theater.
According to The Old Jewish Man in the Simpsons, producers weren’t as good back then as they are today.
That’s right. No actor should be excluded from a role *solely *on the grounds of gender or race, provided he or she is capable of playing it convincingly.
This does not imply Julia Roberts is the ideal candidate for the role.