The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Atlanta’s ‘Hidden Figures’ shines at SAG Awards
Film wins Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture.
Sunday was a big night for Atlanta’s booming television and movie filming industry, as the casts of the motion picture “Hidden Figures” and the Netflix series “Stranger Things” each claimed top honors.
“Hidden Figures,” starring Atlanta’s Janelle Monae, Octavia Spencer, Taraji P. Henson and Mahershala Ali with Kevin Costner and Kirsten Dunst, won for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture.
“Stranger Things,” starring Winona Ryder, Millie Bobby Brown, Noah Schnapp, Finn Wolfhard, Charlie Heaton, David Harbour, Matthew Modine and others, was honored for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Drama Series.
Denzel Washington and Emma Stone took home hardware for best male/female leading roles for “Fences” and “La La Land.” Ali and Viola Davis were the male/ female supporting role winners for “Moonlight” and “Fences.”
“Hidden Figures,” based on the nonfiction book by Margot Lee Shetterly, is up for a best picture Academy Award, and one of its stars, Octavia Spencer, picked up a best supporting actress nomination.
In a recent interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Monae, an Atlanta recording artist and actress, recalled how thrilled she was with the script — but how unfamiliar she was with the story.
The character she was reading for, Mary Jackson, was complex and compelling.
A skilled mathematician and aerospace engineer, Jackson worked alongside her equally brilliant friends, Katherine Johnson (played by Henson) and Dorothy Vaughan (played by Spencer), who, like other African-American women in the 1960s, were employed in a segregated wing of NASA as the United States raced to catch up with the Soviet Union’s outer space ambitions.
The movie is set in Hampton, Va., but was filmed in metro Atlanta, at locations including downtown Canton, East Point and the Morehouse College campus.