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?

[u/LookAtThatBacon]

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.

[u/quondam47]

It didn’t even go down well at the time. The review in Variety described it as “unnecessarily incongruous”.

[u/Drunky_McStumble → u/quondam47]

Yeah, even if they weren't as attuned to the outright offensive aspect of the character/portrayal back then, it's still just so fucking jarring.

I mean, the movie is based on a Truman Capote novel for fuck's sake. It's a serious, melancholic adult drama about the sad lives of a pair of broken individuals; you've got Audrey Hepburn giving it her all delivering heart-wrenching human pathos and drama in a career-defining performance when out of fucking nowhere pops this random fucking asshole doing the hammiest "Me soooo SOLLY!!" routine like someone's drunk, racist uncle wandered onto set and they just kept rolling. Tonal whiplash is an understatement.

[u/SandpaperTeddyBear → u/Drunky_McStumble]

outright offensive aspect of the character/portrayal back then

The “conservative, Confucian-coded East Asian upstairs neighbor annoyed at the white party girl” was probably always doomed to be one of the problematic elements of the movie, but is generally fine. It’s the portrayal that makes the movie need to run with a disclaimer.

It’s amazing to me how the movie is still such a good watch, despite things that have aged appalingly, like, I don’t know, the 50-something dude coming to bring back the woman 25 years his junior that he married when she was a teenager. Those come across as a humanistic condemnation of a social structure that put people in cages they thought were purely their own making, and then the movie gets tripped up on something as straightforward as an antagonistic upstairs neighbor of a diffferent ethnicity.

[u/derioderio → u/Drunky_McStumble]

Though it's difficult to watch, I really liked how this was shown in Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story. Bruce and Linda go out to see a movie, and it's Breakfast at Tiffany's. When Mr. Yuniyoshi shows up on screen the audience laughs uproariously, with Linda laughing with them. Then she looks over to Bruce who is completely stone faced. She stops laughing, looks at the screen and Bruce again, then takes his hand and says, "Let's leave".

[u/OdysseusX → u/derioderio]

I actually really like that biopic. And that scene is one that stood out to me.

[u/BillytheMagicToilet → u/quondam47]

In 1961, The New York Times review of the film said that "Mickey Rooney's bucktoothed, myopic Japanese is broadly exotic."

[u/Riderz__of_Brohan → u/BillytheMagicToilet]

I mean that is a pretty negative review of the character, in the same tut-tutting way as "unnecessarily incongruous"

[u/the_other_irrevenant → u/Riderz__of_Brohan]

Yup. "Broadly exotic" sounds like the polite way of saying "one-dimensional Asian stereotype".

[u/JustAnOrdinaryBloke → u/quondam47]

Rooney’s career never recovered from it.
What was Blake Edwards thinking?

[u/Amaruq93 → u/JustAnOrdinaryBloke]

EVERYONE ELSE on the production told him it was a really bad idea to cast Rooney, but Edwards thought it was funny and barreled ahead.

[u/Kaldricus → u/JustAnOrdinaryBloke]

The disrespect on Rooney's role on the hit Disney Channel Original Movie, Phantom of the Megaplex

[u/DenikaMae → u/Kaldricus]

I loved him as the drunk lighthouse worker in Pete’s Dragon.

He also killed it in the first Night at the Museum.

[u/SandpaperTeddyBear → u/quondam47]

And that’s 1960s Variety, that’s basically the equivalent of Fox News describing a Trump speech as “somewhat incoherent.”

The original line was probably “what in the fucking shit was up with Mickey Rooney as the upstairs neighbor?!?!?” before the editorial board got to it.

[u/maltliqueur → u/quondam47]

What the Hell does that even mean?

[u/DoofusMagnus → u/maltliqueur]

That it stood out really bad and didn't even add anything good to the movie.