VIOLA DAVIS TO PLAY HARRIET TUBMAN IN HBO BIOPIC

From How to Get Away with Murder to one of American history’s most famous women.  We have a long way to go before there are enough biopics about women and people of color to match the full century of movies about Great White Men. And what better way to start evening the score than with a biopic starring Viola Davis? The two-time Oscar nominee is set to star in an HBO movie about Harriet Tubman, the abolitionist and participant in the Underground Railroad who is easily one of the most famous women in American history.

The project, which Variety reports is likely to film during Davis’s hiatus next year from How to Get Away with Murder, will be written by John Adams’s Kirk Ellis, and produced, believe it or not, by Entourage’s Doug Ellin. It will be the third film about Tubman (none of which have been theatrical releases—but we’re focusing on the positive for now); the most famous version was a mini-series released in 1978, in which Tubman was played by Oscar nominee Cicely Tyson.

Technically Harriet Tubman has also been played by Davis’s The Help co-star Octavia Spencer, but we’re told that fictional Tracy Jordan productions don’t actually count.

The ABC series, produced by powerhouse Shonda Rhimes, that has made Davis a bigger star than ever, and makes this Harriet Tubman project not just an overdue effort, but a blockbuster event.