—Octavia Spencer, Oscar nominee for Hidden Figures

I’m grateful for Oscar, and for Golden Globes and Bafta, all of those awards have afforded me the ability to say: ‘No, no, no, I don’t think I want to do that’

When Octavia Spencer first heard the plot of her new movie Hidden Figures, she couldn’t believe it was a true story. ‘I thought it was historical fiction like The Help,” she laughs. “You know, your agents always send you a little teaser blurb: ‘You’ll be meeting with Donna Gigliotti about her upcoming project about three black female mathematicians who helped get our astronauts into space.’ And I thought: ‘OK, well, that’s historical fiction, because I would know that story.’”
Spencer guffaws. Curled up on a sofa in uptown Manhattan, on her second cup of coffee of the morning, she’s far more striking in person than the unassuming roles she tends to be cast in might suggest, but just as outspoken. “Oh!,” she cries, her voice rising a decibel or two when I tell her this. “Did the world hear that?” She adjusts herself, settling back into her seat. “Thank you. Oh, I just yelled that out. Sorry.”
It’s not hard to see why the Academy loves her so much. Spencer won an Oscar for her performance as Minny, the outspoken maid in 2011’s The Help ? and has just received a second nomination for playing supervisor Dorothy Vaughan in Hidden Figures. Adapted from Margot Lee Shetterly’s nonfiction book of the same name, it stars Taraji P Henson, Spencer and Janelle Monáe as the trio of mathematicians Nasa called on to run the maths for the Apollo missions. It has plenty of basis in fact, but, as directed by Ted Melfi, the film is a rambunctious, crowd-pleasing hybrid: part The Help, part The Right Stuff, with many scenes in which Henson has to make the half-mile dash, notebooks flying, for the “coloured” bathrooms half a mile across the Langley campus. “At Nasa, we all pee the same colour,” yells Kevin Costner’s hardass director of Nasa’s maths facility: toilet humour with a civil-rights history lesson attached.
“You’ve got to remember they were all terrified of who was getting to space first,” says Spencer, whose character rendered herself indispensable to Nasa by mastering the newfangled IBM mainframe computer. “What would that mean, would they have missiles pointed at America? America had to get there, and they had to be competitive on that front. It behooved them to disregard gender. It behooved them to disregard race. Thank God they did… black and white women were integral to the space race.”
With pleasing symmetry, the film has broken down a few barriers of its own. On release in the US in December, it earned $60m in just 10 days, knocking Rogue One: A Star Wars Story off the No 1 spot, despite playing in fewer than 2,000 cinemas (and despite Spencer hiring a whole cinema herself so families could see it for free over Martin Luther King weekend). It then parachuted into awards season to win best ensemble at the Screen Actors Guild awards, plus nominations for Golden Globes, Baftas and three Oscar nods. If her mixture of eye-rolling and where’s-mine kvetching in The Help established her as a kind of cross between Esther Rolle and Rodney Dangerfield, it also positioned her perfectly for a film era in which civil rights dramas must compete with billion-dollar franchises for box-office dollars. In a year that is shaping up as a historic rebuke to last year’s #OscarsSoWhite controversy, Spencer’s nomination brings the tally of black nominated actors to six out of a possible 16.
 “I don’t see Oscar voters going: ‘Oh, here’s a black performance. I’m going to vote here for this black person. Oh, wait. Here’s Dev Patel. He’s Indian. I need to vote.’ That’s not how people think in there,” she says. “But the wonderful thing is, there are a lot of movies to choose from, whereas last year there were only a couple of black performances, and there were no Latina performances. There were no Asian performances. You know what I mean? That’s what I want to see.
From her own experience, Spencer knows that an Academy Award is not necessarily the magical career panacea everyone supposes, particularly for black female actors who have a habit of winning and then fading from view, such as Mo’Nique and, to a lesser extent, Jennifer Hudson. “I’m grateful for Oscar, and for Golden Globes and Bafta, all of those awards have afforded me the ability to say: ‘No, no, no, I don’t think I want to do that’,” she says. “Now, I have a little more ownership of what I get to do.” At the same time, she struggled to find good roles after The Help.
 “I loved Fruitvale Station, but then there was a lull in things that I wanted to do, because from that point on I got offered four maid roles, none of them nearly as good as Minny. My thought is: “Look, if you’re going to bring me something that I’ve already done, it needs to be better than this.” After appearing in Fruitvale Station and Smashed, she eventually migrated to television to appear in Fox’s teen medical drama Red Band Society, playing a nurse, something she has done 16 times, according to IMDb. It’s either that or the more caring type of mom.
“It’s one that it’s hard to break out of because it’s the only box that they want to put you in. And I’m like: ‘I don’t have kids, I’m nobody’s mother! If you ask my friends, they’re like: ‘You are the last person who should be a mom.’ I’m always gone. I’ve gotten very used to the needs of one. I am a nurturer of the people who I love so that comes, I guess, a little bit natural, but maybe it also is I’m a control freak. When you nurture, you can also control the situation. It’s like I need to take control of this situation because I know best how to do it.”
Spencer, who was born and raised in Montgomery, Alabama, is the sixth of seven children. She lost her dad when she was 13 and mother when she was 18. “I don’t like to talk about it, it’s just not for public consumption,” she says, but adds: “I was the one being taken care of. I was next to the youngest and when you’re the youngest, you have little say. Everybody else is older than you. You’re the youngest and you’re always going to be told what to do. No, you can’t do that, because this older sibling can babysit, and she can cook, and she can do this, this, this, and this. You’re only the youngest and nobody is going to leave you in charge. Maybe it’s rebelling against that idea. I think I like to control things because I get to have the say.”
Graduating from local Auburn University with a liberal arts degree, she started working on film sets that swung into town, including, aged 19, as an intern on the set of The Long Walk Home, starring Sissy Spacek and Whoopi Goldberg. “My mom had just died,” she says. “It’s not like we were interacting every day and getting the instruction that you would get from your parents, but Whoopi was someone that I could look to if I had things that really, really, really, really troubled me. I guess I could call her and I felt that I could. She took me under her wing while we were on the set and we laughed every day. Whoopi is my mentor.”
Most of the directors she worked for on set asked her to read for a part, but Spencer felt too scared. Finally, she worked as a production assistant on A Time to Kill with Sandra Bullock and Matthew McConaughey. Joel Schumacher was the first director not to request her to read for something. “What’s wrong with you?,” she asked. “Everybody else wants me to read for them!” She was duly cast in a tiny role as Bullock’s nurse –and became firm friends with another production assistant and future director of The Help, Tate Taylor. When Taylor moved to Los Angeles in 1996, she followed, and together with the likes of Allison Janney and Melissa McCarthy formed a small band of displaced southerners in Hollywood. “We had a community,” she says, “and whenever Tate had anything that he was working on, I would work in some capacity.”
The two were in New Orleans, working on the sound mix for his 2003 short Chicken Party, when Taylor’s childhood friend Kathryn Stockett came down to visit for the day. She was working on a novel about black maids in 1950s Mississippi, but Spencer paid it no heed. “It was August in New Orleans. Tate had us on a walking tour. We were walking around in oppressive heat. If it was 100 degrees it felt like it was 110 because of the humidity. I changed diets every other week. I was on some fad diet. I was grumpy and hungry and they’d all eaten biscuits but I was probably not doing carbohydrates. When you’re off the sugar, that first day you are evil. It was literally like: ‘When are we getting there?’ She thought it was hilarious.”
Six years later, she read Stockett’s book, and found not just a character named Octavia, but another, a salty-tongued maid named Minny, whose complaints struck a familiar chord. “That’s what she took from me,” she says. “I just didn’t take any flak. I still don’t. I don’t take anything from anybody. I speak my mind. You always know where you stand with me, but I don’t hold grudges.”
After five years on the road, Spencer is trying to take stock and settle. “I’m at a point in my career, I don’t like travelling to be on location for a long period of time,” she says. “Because the past five years of my life, I’ve not lived in one place. I mean, I’ve had residences in California and Alabama. But I’ve only been in LA 12 weeks this year. That’s not good. I’m re-evaluating what I want to do and where I want to do it.” Next up: a benevolent teacher in Gifted, plus the female deity in a controversial movie version of self-published faith phenomenon The Shack. Then there’s her recurring role in Divergent series. She’s also begun optioning books herself, including one about entrepreneur and philanthropist Madam C J Walker, the first self-made African-American female millionaire.
 “I love the small ones, I do. That’s my thing, as an actor, when you find a small movie, and you know it’s not going to get made unless some big names get attached to it,” she says. “But the wonderful thing about it is the big tent-pole movies, if you look at it, like Captain America, they are getting more diverse in their casting. If you look at Star Wars, if you look at Thor. That’s important, because in that universe, you need to see people of colour, all people of colour, and now we are. That’s the industry. That’s the wonderful thing about the Divergent series. You see all people, and that’s where we need to continue to go.” — Guardian

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