Viola Davis is speaking out on controversial casting in Hollywood.
Speaking to MadameNoir, the Oscar-winner responded to news that a studio executive once suggested Julia Roberts could play abolitionist icon Harriet Tubman.
“It happens all of the time [in Hollywood],” Davis said. “Here’s the thing, simply put: Julia Roberts as Harriet Tubman is ridiculous. That barely warrants a response. That’s ridiculous. I understand that the film industry very much is about commerce and money, I get it. But that’s ridiculous.”
Though Roberts was never involved in the new biopic “Harriet”, screenwriter Gregory Allen Howard wrote about the incident with an unnamed studio head in a recent Los Angeles Times column.
“Fortunately, there was a single black person in that studio meeting 25 years ago who told him that Harriet Tubman was a black woman,” Howard recalled. “The president replied, ‘That was so long ago. No one will know that.’”
Davis added that she is “always a little concerned that the people who are questioned about race and diversity and inclusion, are the people in need and not the people in power.”
“You don’t question the people who have not been invited to the party, you question the people who are throwing the party,” she continued. “And the people who are out there who are living in any way, even within this industry, who have the green light vote, who have the power to finance films, who are making those choices to want to cast a Julia Roberts as a Harriet Tubman, this is a better question for them.”
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Davis also called into question the lack of knowledge among many in the industry.
“Why is it that you are not armed with enough information and why you don’t see it as important to cast a Black woman as Harriet Tubman? Why is it that you would want to make this decision?” she said, “You can go through the history books and see that Harriet Tubman was a Black woman.”
