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demmiblue

(36,865 posts) Tue Jul 23, 2019, 01:17 PM Jul 2019

Harriet: Watch the First Trailer for the Powerful Tubman Biopic

Harriet Tubman’s biopic treatment has finally arrived. In the new trailer for Harriet, Tony winner Cynthia Erivo plays the American hero, tracing her terrifying journey from runaway slave to heroic abolitionist via the Underground Railroad.

The trailer opens on Harriet’s initial escape, running away from a vicious slave owner (played by Joe Alwyn) and braving the unknown. Using a river and the North Star as her guide, she manages to make it out of the south and meet with William Still (Tony-winner Leslie Odom Jr.), a Philadelphia-based abolitionist who helps fugitive slaves find freedom. However, it doesn’t take long for Tubman to decide that she has to go back and help free her family, as well as dozens of other enslaved people. She’s aided by Marie (Janelle Monae), a free black woman who helps train and arm Tubman for the journey ahead.

Directed by Kasi Lemmons (Eve’s Bayou), the biopic also weaves in other elements of Tubman’s life, including her work leading an armed unit of the Union Army during the Civil War, and her tragic romance with former husband John Tubman, who married someone else after Tubman initially escaped. In a 2018 interview with Vanity Fair, Erivo promised the movie would offer a full portrait of the abolitionist icon, focusing on the human elements of her life that tend to get glossed over.

It was tough, though, to portray a woman who suffered so much hardship. “If I was to stay in her body for a really long time, I would not make it out alive most days,” Erivo said. “Like, yesterday was an emotional day, doing the scenes where she finds out [John’s] with someone else. She sees it. She also has her epilepsy—she had seizures. So that whole day, I was essentially in character.”

https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2019/07/harriet-tubman-biopic-trailer