The screenwriter of new biopic Harriet, starring Cynthia Erivo, has revealed an executive proposed Roberts to play the slave turned abolitionist

'No one will know the difference': studio wanted Julia Roberts to play Harriet Tubman

The producer of a new biopic of the celebrated abolitionist Harriet Tubman has said that Julia Roberts was originally tipped to star.

In an official publicity Q&A to promote Harriet, which is released this month, the film’s screenwriter and producer, Gregory Allen Howard, said that when the film was in its planning stages 25 years earlier, “the climate in Hollywood … was very different”.

“I was told how one studio head said in a meeting, ‘This script is fantastic. Let’s get Julia Roberts to play Harriet Tubman,’” Allen explained. “When someone pointed out that Roberts couldn’t be Harriet, the executive responded, ‘It was so long ago. No one is going to know the difference.’”

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According to reports in 2015, the film was once due to star Viola Davis, but now is winning Oscar buzz for Cynthia Erivo’s lead performance. Allen put its lengthy gestation down to the success of two game-changing films.

“When 12 Years a Slave became a hit and did a couple hundred million dollars worldwide, I told my agent, ‘You can’t say this kind of story won’t make money now.’ Then Black Panther really blew the doors open,” Allen said.

Roberts’s casting would have been perceived as grotesque even in 1994. Hollywood’s most notorious cases of blackface occurred more than 60 years ago, including John Wayne’s Genghis Khan, Mickey Rooney’s Japanese neighbour in Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Laurence Olivier’s Othello.

More recent casting decisions that have raised eyebrows were Christian Bale as Moses and Joel Edgerton as Ramses in the 2014 biblical epic Exodus: Gods and Kings, and Angelina Jolie darkening her skin and donning a curly wig to play the French-born, African-Chinese-Cuban-Dutch Mariane Pearl in A Mighty Heart in 2007.