What the what?? I don't know about you but I was annoyed when Halle Bailey was cast as Ariel in the live action remake of The Little Mermaid...Bailey is the farthest thing from a fair skinned, red headed sea person. Think about it, a mermaid living in the deep ocean would be pale since there are no sun rays. Right? It makes sense for Ariel to be pale.
Now I am annoyed that a studio executive would suggest for Harriet Tubman to be played by Julia Roberts. Tubman was a real-life black woman who helped rescue about 70 people using the Underground Railroad. So WHY ON EARTH would someone think it a good idea to cast a white woman as that role??
Screenwriter Gregory Allen Howard has tried to make the story of Harriet Tubman for more than two decades.
Recently, Howard shared a story of how a studio executive had an idea who should play the iconic woman, a slave turned abolitionist who led hundreds of slaves to freedom throughout the Civil War -- Julia Roberts, Entertainment Weekly and CNN reported.
Howard had started working on the movie in 1994, Entertainment Weekly reported.
"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," Howard stated, "I was told how one studio head said in a meeting, 'This script is fantastic. Let's get Julia Roberts to play Harriett Tubman."
Howard's screenplay was eventually turned into the movie "Harriet" which is in theaters now and stars Cynthia Erivo as the freedom fighter, along side Janelle Monáe, Leslie Odom Jr., Jennifer Nettles, Joe Alwyn and Clark Peters.
While Howard did not release the name of the executive who suggested such a ludicrous idea during the Q&A session, he did mentioned that the person argued that Roberts could play the part of Tubman because "It was so long ago. No one is going to know the difference."
That statement alone leads me to believe the executive is a millennial. Seems to me like many millennials do not care about the past and are quick to forget it.
As writer and philosopher George Santayana said, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
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