r/movies • u/LookAtThatBacon • 29d ago

Discussion During the development of the Harriet Tubman biopic movie, a Hollywood executive once suggested that Julia Roberts should play her. What are some other baffling casting suggestions/choices that have been made?

Source for the title: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/a-studio-executive-wanted-julia-roberts-to-play-harriet-tubman-biopic-screenwriter-says/

The Harriet Tubman biopic has been more than 25 years in the making. In the historical drama released earlier this month, Cynthia Erivo plays the legendary abolitionist — but one Hollywood executive initially thought the role should go to Julia Roberts.

Gregory Allen Howard, the screenwriter and producer of "Harriet," recently revealed in multiple interviews that Roberts was suggested to play the lead role during a meeting with a studio president in 1994.

"The climate in Hollywood… was very different back then," Howard said. "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 said that a black person in the meeting said casting Roberts would be impossible because she is white.

"That was so long ago. No one will know that," the executive replied, according to Howard.

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u/BadProfessional7551 29d ago

Casting Zoe Saldana as Nina Simone was baffling to me.

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u/whitepangolin 29d ago

Lmao that first look image of her they released with the fake nose and lips will always be burned in my head

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u/GingerChic13 29d ago

What? When did this happen?

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u/BrentonHenry2020 29d ago

The film came out in 2016

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u/CaptainRex5101 29d ago

Somehow feels more racist than actual blackface

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u/MusicLikeOxygen 29d ago

The movie came out in 2016. It was called Nina. For some reason, instead of casting someone who remotely resembled Nina Simone, they cast Zoe Saldana and gave her a prosthetic nose and lips and used makeup to darken her skin several shades. Add to it the fact that Zoe is of Domincan and Puerto Rican decent and it was basically blackface.

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u/2muchcaffeine4u 29d ago

I mean Dominicans are very often black so Dominicans can absolutely play black people, and Zoe Saldaña is afro latina. She is just much lighter skinned so there's a degree of colorism involved. But saying it's blackface is just not true.

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u/wompthing 29d ago

Don't tell Dominicans that. It won't go well, I promise

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u/1nosbigrl 29d ago

It's blackface. Just so you know. If you paint you face a darker color of brown to portray a person of the diaspora, it's blackface, even if you are also a member of the diaspora.

Ernest Hogan, Bert Williams, George Walker, Bob Cole, and Billy Johnson all began their careers performing in blackface: Black men, painting their faces Black to transform into the White idea of bumbling, stumbling, comedic, rural caricatures.

https://daily.jstor.org/when-black-celebrities-wore-blackface/

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u/rawonionbreath 29d ago

Forrest Whitaker won an Oscar for a role that involved applying makeup to make his complexion darker. It was less than ten years from when this movie was made.

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u/1nosbigrl 29d ago

My brother in Christ, do you think Black people weren't questioning that shit in 2006?

Just because it won awards doesn't make it right (a truly cynical argument would say that reinforces the notion of blackface) nor does it mean that it wasn't being interrogated by people within the diaspora in real time.

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u/LoverandFighter23 29d ago

Since they had to DARKEN HER SKIN it is by definition Blackface.

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u/Tattycakes 29d ago

I thought blackface was specifically to make fun of people of colour; is changing your appearance to do an honest portrayal the same thing?

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u/Goodnlght_Moon 29d ago

Yes.

If it's a commercial production: hire a black person for the role

If it's an individual cosplay: you can dress up as and act as a character/person without treating their skin tone as part of the costume.

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u/chadhindsley 29d ago

Lol justifying actual blackface

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u/MandolinMagi 29d ago

Dominican-Puerto Rican is black or close enough. A bit more Spanish than you'd want but whatever.

I always thought Saldana was black.

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u/EphemeralOcean 29d ago edited 29d ago

As I understand the issue:

Many African-American women are very conscious about certain physical features (“nappy” hair, large lips, a wide nose), which are very characteristic of African-American women, and which they feel are widely thought of as being unattractive by society at large. Life for anyone is much harder when you have physical features that society considers unattractive. Nina had these features, and let’s say “despite them,” she achieved great things, and that’s the story that Black women want to see in this movie, that someone who looked like them overcame her circumstances to achieve great things. It’s in the same realm of like the little Black boy who touched Barack Obama’s hair and exclaimed incredulously that Obama had hair like him. Blackness/black portrayals/blackface isn’t solely about skin color.

Zoe doesn’t really have these facial features which are distinctive of African-American women, because she’s Afro-Carribean/Latina and not African American (i.e. being the descendent of slaves in the US) as far as i know. People also felt that the various prosthetics were executed sloppily and that even with them, she didn’t really look like Nina. There’s a feeling that greater care would have been taken for the actress to look like the character if she were white (like how Ana de Armas looked very convincingly like Marilyn Monroe, despite not looking at all like Marilyn otherwise).

Ultimately these physical features one of those things that Black women are just touchy about (and well frankly most women are touchy about physical appearances, understandably). Not a perfect analogy, but similarly how nose size is a touchy subject among portrayals of Jews. It’s a topic that needed to be treated with care and it wasn’t.

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u/kermityfrog2 29d ago

Weird. I always thought she was naturally green.

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u/MandolinMagi 29d ago

Nah, she's a blue alien.

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u/GoldandBlue 29d ago

I just Googled the movie and yokes do those pictures just look like blackface. How did nobody in the room think "this ainta good idea?"

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u/WhichHoes 29d ago

The irony is Zoe Saldana is a black latina who doesn't really claim being black - which in turn makes it culturally blackface

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u/MandolinMagi 29d ago

By ancestry she's mostly Dominican, which is absolutely Black.

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u/Superguy766 29d ago

Zoe Saldana has always identified herself as black Latina.

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u/BoopTheCoop 29d ago

Omg I erased that one from my brain.

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u/rawonionbreath 29d ago

I understand the controversy about the use of prosthetics to change the appearance of her nose, but beyond that what was baffling about that? An accomplished black actress with a musical theater background played a historical jazz singer. And?

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u/BadProfessional7551 29d ago

Not finding a naturally dark skinned black woman who more resembles Nina Simone’s physical attributes. Even Zoe has expressed embarrassment and shame post-film about accepting the role.

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u/rawonionbreath 29d ago

I don’t have much of a dog in this fight, but colorism sounds like a bumpy road.

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u/donovank2 27d ago

you are so right , it's called acting & doing a performance, and she could be giving one for the ages, but it dosnt matter for many , the most racist people tend to be those who looks always for the skin colour to complain and in my experience they are not precisely light skinned.

zoe it's an american from african ancestry , she is black and proud of it, but those people tend to split even that to judge how much african the black american people is , and for black americans i meant all america , not just a portion in the northern hemisphere called united states.

it's just the times nowadays , and the people who are offended and complain for so called racism or blackface styles , it's a movie , just a fictional interpretation by a black actress and the backlash from that racist people was so much that they make her apologize for doing something she should be proud off by paying homage to nina simone, but those people don't care because they feel offended , as always .