‘Underground’ takes on story of American icon Harriet Tubman
Aisha Hinds says she wept when she learned she would be cast as Harriet Tubman in the second season of WGN America’s “Underground.”
Initially, the actress wasn’t sure how to play the historic figure. Tubman was an escaped slave, who in the 1850s led hundreds of slaves to freedom along the route of the Underground Railroad.
“I was stuck in a place of reverence for her, and it took quite a while for me to give myself permission to stand in the authority of her as a revolutionary,” says Hinds, who will also be seen later this month in the new crime drama “Shots Fired” on Fox.
Finally, Hinds decided that Tubman’s “story in and of itself is completely powerful and moves on its own” and credits the series creators Joe Pokaski and Misha Green with “beautifully” crafting the character.
When viewers first meet Tubman on “Underground,” which begins its second season Wednesday, she is holding a rifle on a bounty hunter who was trying to capture a runaway slave. That’s not a TV embellishment. The woman, sometimes referred to as “Moses” for leading her people out of slavery, was known to carry guns when needed.
Later, during the Civil War, she became and armed scout and spy for the Union.
While last season “Underground” followed the fates of seven slaves as they tried to escape from a Georgia plantation, this year’s story is more of an empowering call to action and puts a lot of focus on the female characters. One of them, Rosalee (Jurnee Smollett-Bell), now that she has escaped, has joined forces with Tubman, and wants to go back to rescue more slaves.
It echoes practically the first thing the real Tubman did after reaching freedom, which was go back for family members, many of whom had been scattered because of slavery.
When she was 8, Smollett-Bell says her mother gave her a biography of Tubman. “She told me to read it, and so it’s so amazing how it’s come full circle for me.”
This season Rosalee will be running toward danger instead of away from it, says the actress. “For her, it was really about learning from this great woman and trying to become her own warrior,” referring to Tubman.
The second season will also pick up the story of Noah (Aldis Hodge), who is in a jail in Ohio facing murder charges. Northern attorney John Hawkes (Marc Blucas) is working on a dangerous plan to free him, while his wife, Elizabeth (Jessica De Gouw), joins an armed group of Underground abolitionist women — both black and white — masquerading as a sewing circle.
They are angry and frustrated that most people in the North don’t understand the brutality of slavery and are intent on changing the narrative, which could include violence.
“We try to stay historically accurate, but we try to understand the people behind the myth as well,” says Green. She notes the series is set in 1858, the year before the famous raid by John Brown, an abolitionist who advocated violence to end slavery.
It was also the year Tubman met Brown.
Pokaski adds that it was a time when anti-slavery groups were arguing, “How do we best conquer this great evil?” He says the more research they did the more they realized “that these people were not only deeper, more fragile, more human than you thought — stronger than you can ever imagine.”
Another historic character to be introduced for a few episodes this season is Frederick Douglass, who will be played by John Legend, an executive producer of the series.
“The opportunity to play him is a humbling thing for me to do,” says Legend, who stresses the role is little more than a cameo.
For Smollett-Bell, the best part of “Underground” is that it represents characters — whether Tubman or Douglass and slaves or former slaves — as real.
“They are flesh and blood people who laugh, who love. They are not victims. They were victimized, but that’s not all that happened to them. They were people who wanted to build families, wanted to build lives, wanted to get married, wanted to build a home together.”