Octavia Spencer Cracks a Few Hollywood Equations
A l’affiche dans Les figures de l’ombre.
Octavia Spencer, née en 1970 à Montgomery dans l’Alabama, est une actrice, productrice et réalisatrice à succès. Titulaire de l'Oscar de la meilleure actrice dans un second rôle pour La Couleur des sentiments en 2012, elle est aujourd’hui à l’affiche du très réussi Les figures de l’ombre où elle fait encore preuve de l’étendue de son talent.
TORONTO — On a film set in Canton, Mississippi, two decades ago, Octavia Spencer got a big break, and a foreshadowing that others might be harder to catch. She was in her mid-20s, working as a production assistant on the Matthew McConaughey-Sandra Bullock thriller “A Time to Kill.” She asked the director Joel Schumacher if she could read for a small part: perhaps the woman who starts a riot?
2. “He said: ‘No, honey, your face is too sweet. You can be Sandy’s nurse,'” she recalled, laughing. She was sitting, regally postured, in a private glassedin room at a hotel restaurant. That face was youthful at 46 and frequently lit by a signature ear-to-ear grin. “It was so funny because I didn’t know that there was such a thing as typecasting. It’s like, ‘You’re just a nurse face.’ What is a nurse face?” According to IMDB.com, Spencer has played a nurse 16 times.
3. Spencer is African-American, female, in her 40s and not twig-shaped — Venn-diagram those traits atop the circle marked “Available Parts,” and the overlapping area shrinks to pea-size. Still,
in the years since, she has built a sturdy resume as a recognizable character actor on TV and in films. Her breakthrough came in “The Help” (2011), as the subjugated Mississippi maid who cloaks her revenge in pie. But the accolades for the performance, topped by an Oscar for best supporting actress, didn’t immediately expand her options. “I played Mother Earth so much that I can probably whip up some moss for you right now,” she said.
HIDDEN FIGURES
4.These days, however, Spencer is slipping past limitations, moving into producing off-screen and guiding her on-screen career away from “nurse face” roles. She will appear this month in a true story so rarely told that she at first assumed it was fiction. “Hidden Figures” is about the AfricanAmerican female mathematicians — called “computers” (as in: one who computes) — who worked at NASA in civil rights-era Virginia. Spencer plays Dorothy Vaughan, a supervisor who teaches herself and her black female staff to program the new IBM mainframe computer.
5. Dorothy is one of a triad of NASA friends, along with characters played by Taraji P. Henson and Janelle Monáe. “Octavia is a real girl’s girl. She makes it a point to uplift all women, just like Dorothy,” said Monáe, who is better known as a musician. Monáe arrived with newbie nerves, but Spencer offered her business advice and sent encouraging texts after big scenes. “Our characters were dealing with sexism, racism, segregation, and they depended on the support of the women they were working with. Octavia exemplifies that on-screen, and she does that in real life.”
OTHER WORKS
6. A long list of talented performers have struggled to remain relevant after winning the Oscar for best supporting actress. Spencer, too, noted that the award didn’t mean an automatic promotion to leading roles; she was offered a lot of maids.
7. So she followed “The Help” with indies like “Smashed,” a 2012 chamber piece about alcoholism. In the biographic “Fruitvale Station,” she was cast as the mother of Oscar Grant III, the young black man killed by a white transit officer in Oakland, California, in 2009. Right before production began, the filmmakers lost $150,000 of the $900,000 budget. Spencer pulled out her producing hat. “I put money in, and I started calling all of my rich friends to buy $25,000 increments, or units,” Spencer said. “Being a producer is pretty much solving a puzzle. It’s putting people together and in the right place. I do that in my own life.”
8. In addition to her screen work, she’s also the author of a series for middle-schoolers called “Randi Rhodes: Ninja Detective.” Of those books, Spencer said, “I wanted to give back,” a phrase she used many times, referring to working with minority directors, producing, helping young actors. In person, she has a lean-close Southern warmth and a kind of lightheartedness, but a weight of responsibility seems to bear down on her current career.
TYPECASTING?
9. Many of the best African-American actors repeatedly find themselves in worthy but grave narratives built around slavery and civil rights — prestige parts, yes, but shouldn’t the possibilities be wider? “I’ve yet to play anyone who remotely resembles me,” Spencer said. “I’m carefree. I don’t have kids. I’m more of a romantic comedy, dating the wrong people and trying to find love.” She riffed on the travails of industry dating: “You do not want to muddy the waters at work.” Then she leaned in: “But sometimes you just have to track a little mud.” The grin got wider.