Those were the divine moments, where I honestly can’t take any credit for whatever the performance is, because it almost became like I wasn’t even there.On March 27, 1857, an elderly Quaker abolitionist named Thomas Garrett climbed the stairs to his office in Wilmington, Delaware, and penned the following letter to a fellow conductor on the underground railroad: “I have been very anxious for some time past, to hear what has become of Harriet Tubman. What Hinds entered was a state “where the brain emptied itself, and I could really feel her presence pushing the story out of me. That’s when I felt confident that Harriet had this.” “In that moment I knew that I had to depend on nothing else but Harriet Tubman. “I took a moment, I took a breath, and I removed the earpiece,” she says. But to her dismay she found the earpiece emitted a distracting level of static. With this arrangement, “I breathed a sigh of relief,” Hinds recalls. “I laugh about it now, but I was so anxious,” she confides.Īs a backup system, the producers arranged for her to wear an earpiece, with Green standing by to feed her any needed cue. Could she possibly learn all that dialogue in such a short amount of time?ĭay one called for filming the first two acts of the hour’s total of five. ![]() “Usually an episode would take six to eight days,” notes Hinds, who received the first half of the 45-page script just 10 days beforehand, and the other half a few days later. Despite airing as the sixth of the 10-episode season, it was the last episode shot, during the final three days before production wrapped last November. This remarkable episode was shot, like the rest of Underground, in Savannah, Georgia. Cause a country built on bodies will always need more for the slaughter.” “Big or small, there ain’t no compromises, no half-measures. “There ain’t no negotiations on freedom,” she declares. Over and over, she returned to the South to lead others to safety. But the work wasn’t done once she escaped. Stirringly Tubman recounts the work that won her freedom when finally she crossed the line into Pennsylvania. It ain’t easy, but that’s the work that must be done.” And that’s the first step to truly being free, when you can see past all the things that you know and believe something better. Tubman calls slavery “the next thing to hell” and likens the taste of it to “all your teeth made of copper.”īorn into slavery at its most brutal extreme, she speaks of how initially she “spent all my time knowing things instead of believing them. The script, written by series co-creator Misha Green and Joe Pokaski, draws on Tubman’s history and words. ![]() The episode is set in what appears to be a remote barn or storage shed where, some night in the late 1850s, a couple dozen sympathizers have gathered furtively to hear from this champion of freedom. More specifically, Aisha Hinds, who this season has portrayed Tubman, will deliver a powerful, passionate episode-length oration channelling Tubman.įor Hinds, it was “an honour and a call to duty.” The episode will premiere on WGN America on Wednesday at 8 p.m., with back-to-back repeats continuing through a replay at 1 a.m. It will pause its overarching narrative for a night to let Tubman tell her own story in the form of a solo performance. ![]() Now Tubman is the focus of something special, even unprecedented in episodic TV, with this week’s Underground episode. NEW YORK - Harriet Tubman, who escaped from slavery in the antebellum South to become a leading abolitionist, is best known today as a righteous figure and the future face on the $20 bill.īut for viewers of Underground this season, Tubman has come to life as a character on this drama about the treacherous journey to freedom along a secret network of safe houses that came to be called the Underground Railroad.
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