“Every great dream begins with a dreamer,” said former slave Harriet Tubman, responsible for releasing the shackles of generations of slaves before the American Civil War. The upcoming biopic Harriet, which will chronicle the life of the heroic abolitionist, has just added Janelle Monáe to the cast alongside Tony, Emmy and Grammy Award-winner Cynthia Erivo as Tubman.
Harriet is being directed by Kasi Lemmons (Eve’s Bayou, Talk To Me) off a screenplay she co-wrote with Gregory Allen Howard (Ali, Remember the Titans). This will be Lemmons’ first directorial feature since Black Nativity in 2013.
Harriet follows Tubman, who was born into slavery, escaped in 1849 and helped free dozens of slaves through the Underground Railroad during the pre-Civil War period. Tubman served as a spy for the Union Army during the war and campaigned for women’s suffrage after it ended, so it seems a bit odd that she’s not that well known outside America – and odder still that she hasn’t already had her lifestory told.
Monáe joins Tony and Grammy Award-winner Leslie Odom Jr., Joe Alwyn, multiple Grammy Award-winner Jennifer Nettles, Clarke Peters, Vanessa Bell Calloway, Zackary Momoh, Deborah Ayorinde, and Vondie Curtis-Hall. Details about Monáe’s role are still under wraps.
“My grandmother was a sharecropper. She picked cotton in Aberdeen, Mississippi,” Monáe proclaimed when she performed at the January 21, 2017, Women’s March in Washington, D.C. Fresh off her masterful science fiction inflected third solo album Dirty Computer and the accompanying Dirty Computer: An Emotion Picture, the Prince protégé kept full creative and branding control as a non-negotiable condition when Sean Combs signed her to Bad Boy Records in 2008.
Monáe previously acted in Moonlight and Hidden Figures, and will soon be seen in Robert Zemeckis’ Welcome to Marwen, which co-stars Steve Carrell, Leslie Mann, Diane Kruger and Gwendoline Christie.
Harriet is set to begin filming this October in Virginia, and should be aiming for a release around 2020 – when Tubman’s face was supposed to be put on the 20 dollar bill (before the US Treasury Secretary controversially threw the idea out, saying that he had “more important issues to focus on”).
Culture Editor Tony Sokol cut his teeth on the wire services and also wrote and produced New York City’s Vampyr Theatre and the rock opera AssassiNation: We Killed JFK. Read more of his work here or find him on Twitter @tsokol.