How Cynthia Erivo took the US by storm – with a little help from Aretha and Oprah
You would hesitate to call it an image problem, but the anti-slavery activist Harriet Tubman has had some representation issues lately. In May, the Trump administration abruptly postponed plans to feature Tubman on the new $20 bill. She would have been the first African American to appear on a US banknote, and the first woman in 150 years. The Treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, made excuses about “security issues”; Donald Trump had already described the plan, hatched in the Obama era, as “pure political correctness”.
In this light, a biopic of Tubman should be something to applaud, although the fact that the movie, Harriet, is the first major film about her (and took 25 years to reach the screen) tells its own story about representation. As does the screenwriter Gregory Allen Howard’s recent revelation that, when he was first pitching the story, one studio suggested the ideal actor to play Tubman would be Julia Roberts.
It is not as if Tubman’s life lacked significance or incident. In 1849, she fled her slave plantation and walked nearly 100 miles north to freedom. Then she turned round and went back, 19 times, helping at least 70 other slaves to freedom via the “underground railway” – the network of secret routes that enabled their escape. Later, Tubman aided the union in the American civil war, even leading a raid to liberate slaves from plantations in South Carolina. Later still, she was active in the women’s suffrage movement.
There has been a gap to fill not just in terms of representation but also imagery. In the surviving still photographs, Tubman comes across as an intimidatingly serious woman, staring into the camera with an expression set somewhere between defiance and disapproval. (For the $20 bill design, she was given a half-smile.) In reality, she was more like an action hero, suggests Cynthia Erivo, the British actor charged with portraying Tubman. When she was leading slaves to freedom, “she was much younger than what we see in those pictures. It feels as if she’s a still person, but she had movement and action. She was a human being with the full scope of emotions: sadness, love, happiness, all of that. We wanted to make sure people knew that of her.”
You could describe Harriet as something of a breakthrough for 32-year-old Erivo, but her career seems to have consisted of nothing but breakthroughs. This is just her third movie role, after Steve McQueen’s Widows (she was Belle, the badass single mum), and Bad Times at the El Royale, in which her a cappella renditions of Motown tunes woke up the movie world to the fact that Erivo is a better singer than most professional singers. She may be just over 5ft tall, but her voice is so powerful it could knock over a rhino.
Theatre audiences already knew about her voice from her leading roles in the musicals of Sister Act, in the West End, and The Color Purple, in the West End and on Broadway. In The Color Purple on Broadway, Erivo’s ballad I’m Here regularly prompted spontaneous standing ovations midway through the show. The role earned her a best actress Tony. Then the cast recording of the soundtrack won her a Grammy. Then, when she performed the title song on NBC’s Today show, she won an Emmy for it. Even if Harriet doesn’t bag Erivo an Oscar to complete the set in record time (she sings the film’s closing song as well), the future is looking bright. “It has been incredible,” she says. “A bit of whirlwind.”
In person, Erivo has no discernible image problems. She could be the textbook illustration of how far black femininity has come since Tubman’s day. In public appearances, she is unerringly stylish: hair closely cropped and bleached white, flamboyant couture, numerous ear piercings. When we meet at a London hotel, she is relatively dressed down, her hair concealed by a headscarf. Her only concession to glamour is the fingernails: long talons coated in a sci-fi-looking mother-of-pearl lacquer.
Directed by Kasi Lemmons, Harriet is closer to The Adventures of Robin Hood than, say, 12 Years a Slave. It doesn’t dodge the injustice and complexity of the landscape, but it is an epic, action-packed, inspirational tale. Which is to say, recreating Tubman’s exploits was exhausting. Filming in rainy rural Virginia, Erivo was required to leap off bridges, swim rivers, wade through bogs, gallop through forests, climb cliffs and much more – all in cumbersome 19th-century costume. At the same time, Erivo’s Harriet runs an emotional gamut. “While we were on set, if anything got difficult there was a saying: ‘HTH’, which was ‘Harriet Tubman hard’. So if it wasn’t Harriet Tubman hard, it was fine, we were going to get through it. And nothing was Harriet Tubman hard, so we always got through it.”
One connection Erivo found to Tubman was through religion. As a child, Tubman was struck on the head by a heavy weight, thrown by a slave owner at somebody else. It hit her with such force it is said to have cracked her skull. As she puts it in the movie: “The hole in my head made God’s voice more clear.” At one point in the movie, midway through a chase through woodlands, with the slavecatchers closing in, she stops to ask the lord for directions. Improbably enough, her divine spider sense leads people to safety. It sounds fanciful, but the episode is based on Tubman’s testimony.
“We believe because she believes,” says Erivo. The actor describes herself as a person of faith. She prayed before going on to set every day – for guidance, to lose her own vanity, for energy on days she was tired and “to make the space safe and open for her because I feel as if Harriet is complicit in this storytelling. I feel that she’s around. It’s comforting to be able to reach into your faith to tell the story of somebody who has faith.”
At one point, God appeared to intervene more directly. It was the day they were shooting a pivotal scene, in which Harriet crosses the state line into Pennsylvania, and into freedom for the first time. Tubman described the moment herself: “There was such a glory over everything; the sun came like gold through the trees and over the fields, and I felt like I was in heaven.” On the day of the shoot it rained nonstop. The skies were dark and gloomy. But at the very last moment, the clouds briefly parted into a glorious sunset, complete with a double rainbow. The scene in the finished movie looks as if it must have been CGI-enhanced.
Parallels between the turbulent precivil war landscape of Harriet and today’s political climate are hard to ignore, Erivo acknowledges. Not just the resurgence of white nationalism that lay behind the banknote cancellation, but also the racial injustices, the forced separation of families in the US and the repatriation of black, Windrush-generation immigrants in the UK. “Hopefully, the film will serve as a reminder that if we don’t do the work we’re supposed to do, we’re going to go backwards. Too much work has been done in the past. If we’re complacent about that, we’re only going to endanger ourselves.”
Storm clouds have gathered over Harriet’s own representational choices, however. Commentators have also questioned the movie’s decisions to make Tubman’s chief antagonist a black bounty hunter, and to have her white slave-master intervene at a critical moment, like a “white saviour” – both fictional embellishments. A #NotMyHarriet tag has emerged on Twitter, and there have even been calls for a boycott. Lemmons dismissed these accusations as “completely ridiculous”, pointing out that black slave-hunters did really exist, and the supposed “white saviour” is the reason Harriet is being hunted in the first place.
In addition, Erivo’s casting has fed into what has become a perennial complaint about British actors taking prestige African American roles –David Oyelowo as Martin Luther King in Selma, for example, Chiwetel Ejiofor in 12 Years a Slave or Daniel Kaluuya in Get Out. Her response is simple: “Before I’m British, I’m a black woman. The first things people see are the colour of my skin and my sex. That’s how I have lived my whole life. On top of which, I am firstgeneration African. My mother came from Nigeria, so that is very much my culture as well. I have seen people insult my mother for being from where she is from, and I’ve been insulted for that. All I can do as an actor is to tell the story. That’s my job.”
Erivo grew up in south London. Her mother is a health worker; her father was “not in the picture” and she has only seen him once since she was 16. She had “a pretty cool childhood”, she says. She went to a Catholic school, had a lot of friends, and asked a lot of questions. Acting and singing came early and simultaneously: five-year-old Erivo was put forward to sing Silent Night in the school nativity play. But as with so many Britons from similar backgrounds, the route to a career in performing was not mapped out in any way. After a year studying music psychology at the University of East London, she ran into a former mentor from an acting workshop, who
expressed surprise that Erivo was not training to be an actor. The mentor said she thought Erivo had a good chance of getting into the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts (Rada). Erivo asked: “What’s Rada?”
Erivo did get in. She was one of four people of colour in her year. Despite that rhino-tipping voice, she was cast in a minor role in a musical “because I probably didn’t need the help”. The lead role went to another actor who had barely ever sung. She recalls an incident when one of the other performers lost their voice and Erivo sang her part from behind a curtain, while the other actor lip-synced to her vocals, Singin’ in the Rain-style.“It still makes me feel a little bit yuck to think that I even agreed to it.”
British drama has come a way since then, but it is still striking that all of Erivo’s prominent roles, on stage and screen, have been playing American characters. Again, it’s a matter of representation. “If you never see yourself on screen, which is what was happening at around my time, you don’t know that there’s any way to do it because there’s no example.” She now lives in New York. The move wasn’t entirely intentional. With some help from Oprah Winfrey (the showbiz equivalent of divine intervention), the 2013 London revival of The Color Purple transferred to Broadway. Erivo was the only cast member to go with it.
Next up, Erivo has another daunting African American idol on her hands: Aretha Franklin, in National Geographic’s forthcoming Genius anthology series. “This one is more of a joy because I love Aretha Franklin,” she says. Franklin, who died last year, came to see Erivo in The Color Purple, and was in the audience when she sang The Impossible Dream at the 2016 Kennedy Center Honors. At one point during Erivo’s performance, the camera pans to Franklin, singing along with her eyes shut. “It’s just one of my favourite things to keep going back to,” Erivo says with some pride.
As for matching Franklin’s voice, an unthinkable task for most humans, “there are challenges”, she admits, “but I’ve been singing for a long time, so
I know my instrument. After doing The Color Purple eight shows a week, you know your limits. So I think I’ll be OK.” Hard, but not Harriet Tubman hard. Very little seems to be for Erivo these days. There was no route to stardom mapped out for her, but she got there anyway. “I’m consistently grateful,” she says, “for what I have, what I go through, what I get to do and how free I am because there was a lot sacrificed in order for that to happen.”
• Harriet is released in the UK on 22 November