ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: This is a big episode for Harriet Tubman.
Where is she at this point in the series?
How do you conceptualize what you do here?
Credit: WGN America
It’s kind of a monologue, kind of a one-woman show, kind of a lecture.
It feels like all of those things.
It’s basically the 1800s version of a TED Talk.
If you want to know where TED Talks come from, Harriet Tubman started it.
This is how she actually moved about.
She would go around and share her story in this way.
Our attention span has a stopwatch on it.
It really is challenging in that way.
How did you prepare for this?
I started by readingSarah Bradford’s books.
You feel the humanity of Harriet Tubman in those pages.
That was my approach, but I gotta tell you, I was incredibly intimidated.
All of the things I would’ve relied on as an actor, I didn’t have those luxuries.
That is what happened in this experience.
I got half of the script 10 days before, the other half seven days before.
I got a fever, I was throwing up, I was fatigued because I wasn’t sleeping.
It makes all the sense in the world to me when I look back retrospectively.
It was such a beautiful, transcendent experience for us all.
None of what we did should’ve been possible because none of us had ever done it before.
This is not a convention that is custom for television, it’s never been done before.
We were all traveling grounds we had never traveled before, which is very much like Harriet Tubman.
Even me getting sick was important, to remind me that this was bigger than me.
That was something I allowed to be brought over from that side of the experience.
I also approached it by not putting an enormous pressure on myself to not do a Harriet Tubman biopic.
I knew I could rely on Joe and Misha to craft words that were amazing and honorable and powerful.
She had already lived this life and she had done all the heavy lifting.
I showed up basically just open and available.
It’s always interesting to watch historical dramas because we have 20/20 vision, we know what comes next.
How does that shadow influence this episode?
I think that the presence of Harriet is one that has to ready everyone.
That’s why I think it’s important to roll it out for them.
How do you think Harriet Tubman’s story speaks to us now?
I think her spirit is one that we need today.
I think her spirit is one that is deliberately revisiting us.
Working on these characters in parallel to each other, what similarities have you felt between them?
Obviously both characters are activists in their own right and passionate about the fight against all injustice.
Sometimes when you think of people of faith, people attribute a complacency, that we pray through everything.
