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On a film set in Canton, Mississippi, USA, 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?
“He said: ‘No, honey, your face is too sweet. You can be Sandy’s nurse,’” she recalled, laughing. “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.
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 recognisable 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.
These days, however, Spencer is slipping past limitations, moving into producing off-screen and guiding her on-screen career away from ‘nurse face’ roles. At Christmas, she will appear in a true story so rarely told that she at first assumed it was fiction. Hidden Figures is heart-swelling Oscar bait about the African-American female mathematicians, called ‘computers’, 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.
Dorothy is one of a triad of NASA friends, along with characters played by Taraji P Henson and Janelle Monáe. “Spencer 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. Spencer exemplifies that on-screen, and she does that in real life.”
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. 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.”
Acutely aware of the lack of diversity in Hollywood on both sides of the camera, Spencer is determined to make a correction. She has begun optioning books, including one about Madam C J Walker, considered the first self-made African-American female millionaire. “Since making Hidden Figures, I don’t have a problem saying to a room of male executives: ‘I need a female writer or a female director,’ or ‘I need a black voice or a Latin voice,’” she said.
While casting her eye toward producing, the big parts arrived. She’s working so much that she has spent only six weeks at home in Los Angeles this year. Spencer appears in the Divergent series and was here shooting for Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water. In Shape, she is back in the civil rights era, and at NASA, too, but this time as a cleaning lady. “It’s really difficult to be in that mindset of the ‘60s and then go out into the real world and have fun,” she said. “So I don’t. I isolate.”
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.
A few days later, Spencer sent an email expressing concern about her comments on speaking up in meetings about diversity. “The big boys were big boys,” she wrote. “They heard me and encouraged me to have a voice, always listened to my needs. We as women should always ask for what we need and might be surprised that there might not be as much resistance as we perhaps perceive.”
It was deft and somehow poignant, an illustration of the delicate dance required in Hollywood, even — or perhaps especially — for an actor of a certain stature.