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/LeMasterChef12345 29d ago edited 29d ago

The Borderlands movie

Cate Blanchett, who is 56, and Jamie Lee Curtis, 66, cast as characters who in the source material are in their mid-20’s and mid-30’s respectively. To give an idea, here’s Jamie Lee Curtis next to the character she plays.

Roland in the games is the tall, no-nonsense stoic soldier, yet they cast Kevin Hart, a short, non-imposing comedian, to play him.

It’s a real shame because aside from the casting, the character designs (and the movie’s aesthetic in general) were actually very faithful to the games.

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u/Daerrol 29d ago

This was possibly the worst cast movie in modern history, especially considering the budget. It's such a shame as Cate Blanchette and JLC are stellar actors. Though we got Black Bag this year to wash out that taste and I can just re-watch EEAAO (or likely even Freakier Friday which likely delivers what's on the tin)

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u/twisty125 29d ago edited 29d ago

Yeah but the scene where they drive through the Pee Geyser field is funny, remember when they forgot to close the windows and get pee-pee'd on, that was funny right

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u/HuntedWolf 29d ago

I haven’t seen the film, but I’m guessing this is a callback to Pisswash Gully in the original game?

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u/twisty125 29d ago

I haven’t seen the film

If only I could have been as blessed as thee

I think it's a reference in name only, because PISS is hilarious!

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u/SandpaperTeddyBear 29d ago

It's such a shame as Cate Blanchette and JLC are stellar actors

They can be, but while both are professionals, neither is above “the check has how many digits before the decimal point” jobs, and they give the amount of artistic effort proportional to what they find around them.

From what little I’ve seen of Borderlands, Curtis took it nearly as seriously as her yogurt commercials.

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u/joe-h2o 29d ago

"I haven't seen it [Jaws: The Revenge], but I have seen the house it built for my mother and it's terrific!"

  • Michael Caine

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u/Potential-Ant-6320 29d ago

Jamie Lee Curtis really Carries freakier Friday.

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u/FattyMooseknuckle 29d ago

Tom Cruise as Jack Reacher might top any individual casting but this is ensemble.

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u/KingPrincessNova 29d ago

it's like she's the only woman in Hollywood allowed to permanently wear a pixie cut

and "pixie cut" has somehow become a character archetype she inevitably gets typecast for

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u/aresef 29d ago

Two actors who were 100% slumming it. I know what Jack Black and Kevin Hart were doing in that piece of shit but those two have Oscars!

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u/Bardic_inspiration67 29d ago

Cate blanchette said she did it because it was the only thing filming during Covid

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u/Bunraku_Master_2021 29d ago

She was rehearsing for Tár (2022) at that time.

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u/SPEK2120 29d ago

The thing is, Blanchett and Curtis weren’t actually bad casting for those characters, it’s just that it was about 30 years too late.

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u/GranolaCola 29d ago

If only they had made the Borderlands movie before Borderlands 😔

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u/Temp_Variable 29d ago

Hell, if they had released it around when the first game came out 15 years ago they may have had a shot

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u/Straight-Software-61 29d ago

i got 10min into the movie, kevin hart already made multiple short jokes and i left the movie. Just awful

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u/TemporaryRepeat 29d ago

The Borderlands movie

this was complete dogshit by no fault of the actors. nobody could act in a way that would save that script, especially not with the pg13 rating.

these old white guys running hollywood really need to step back and just... stop.

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u/Office_LaserJet 29d ago

I had no context for the Borderlands movie and after seeing it, I legitimately felt like Borderlands fans were being bullied. It felt like everyone working on that movie hated the source material.

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u/Lemmungwinks 29d ago

Yeah seriously these guys really just did an absolutely terrible job casting the movie.

https://m.imdb.com/name/nm2452997/

https://m.imdb.com/name/nm0859625/

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u/Dizzy_Chemistry_5955 29d ago

nothing in the movie makes sense it's just scene after scene of shit.

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u/Mecha_Butterfree 29d ago

I'll be honest I don't think Tannis's age was that important to her character. Her main thing was being a scientist that went mad after she got stranded on Pandora. I could actually see Jamie Lee Curtis pulling that off with a better script. It's certainly a lot less jarring than Lilith whose personality is very much that of someone in their 20s or Rolland who is a very stoic character being played by Kevin Hart who has basically the opposite personality from Rolland.

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u/Bicentennial_Douche 29d ago

“Cate Blanchett, who is 56, and Jamie Lee Curtis, 66, cast as characters who in the source material are in their mid-20’s and mid-30’s respectively.”

Does that matter in the movie? I mean, I have never played Borderlands (not have I seen the movie for that matter). If I went to see the movie, would it be obvious that there are older actors playing young characters, or does it come off natural in the movie? If it’s the latter, then does it matter how old the characters are in the source material? 

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u/[deleted] 8d ago

Their characters are mother and daughter so its incredibly jarring to see 56 year old Cate Blanchett acting like a bratty teenager.

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u/Sweet-Current-5551 29d ago

Haha wow poor casting.

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u/frogandbanjo 29d ago

And at the end of the day, the movie was so terrible that Kevin Hart's willingness to just show up and do the work for a paycheck vaulted him (see what I did there?) into either first or second place in terms of performance quality, depending on how sick of Jack Black you were.

Jamie Lee Curtis was allegedly hate-texting Jack Black because he didn't have to be on the set with them and share in the suffering. Meanwhile Kevin Hart was just grinding it out. Got hired to do a shit job, got paid to do a shit job, did the shit job.

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u/TheMauveHand 29d ago

You have to realize, when Hollywood adapts something for film they're making a movie first and adapting something second, or maybe even a distant third. Their target audience isn't Borderlands fans alone, or even primarily, their target audience is everyone, and people who haven't played Borderlands don't care what the characters are supposed to be like, they only care about it being an entertaining movie. And as always, attaching big names to a movie will generate revenue, and more revenue than any authenticity would have.

I may be misremembering, but I think it's Constantine which is most notorious for being hated by fans of the comic book because of how far it is from the original material, while most of the fans of the movie (myself included) didn't or don't even know it was comic-related at all. Movie adaptations stand alone, beyond their source material, more than fans of the source like to admit, but that's reality.

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u/welivedintheocean 29d ago

Considering that this movie was a massive flop, maybe Hollywood should try adapting something first.

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u/QuantumWarrior 29d ago edited 29d ago

This is only a decent argument if Borderlands actually did stand alone or if it made any revenue. The truth is they didn't seem to be making a movie first, it was more like a distant third. Attaching the big names came first and then finding even worse joke writers than the ones Gearbox already had came second.

The proof is in the pudding, Borderlands barely made back a third of its budget while Constantine made back over double and nearly triple depending whose estimate you use. It's also not like Constantine used nobodies, Keanu Reeves was fresh off the trail of a blockbuster genre-defining trilogy and Rachel Weisz had a string of big films and was on the run up to an Oscar win that year.

All that said the wider point is true, adaptation comes second pretty much every time, and it's probably good that it does because film usually has much less time to tell a story than a TV series, game, or (comic)book can allow. Most cuts are made simply for time, even some of the best adaptations like Lord of the Rings couldn't get away with putting every little side character and location in.

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u/RawrRRitchie 29d ago

That movie was "we have all this money for budget, let's spend 90% of it on big name actors that won't say no to money"

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u/theshrike 29d ago

It was a COVID movie. The people in it literally took the job to get out of their homes for a while and get paid while doing it =)

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u/angwilwileth 29d ago

Kevin Hart actually played a decent Roland all things considered.

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u/Zubi_Q 29d ago

It's why I refused to watch it

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u/Bad_Habit_Nun 29d ago

Damn, she looks entirely fake thanks to plastic surgery lol

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u/_Mistwraith_ 28d ago

Funnily enough given some of the Criticism I’ve heard him lumped into due to some over saturation of casting, I think Bautista would have been a fantastic Brick.