Monday, March 18, 2024

Octavia Spencer on Why NASA Movie About Black Women is Overdue

Octavia Spencer

*”Hidden Figures” is an upcoming drama that recounts the true story of African-American mathematician, Katherine Johnson, and her two colleagues, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson, who helped NASA during the Space Race.

Directed by Theodore Melfi and written by Allison Schroeder, and based on the non-fiction book of the same name by Margot Lee, the film stars Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, Kevin Costner, Jim Parsons, Janelle Monáe, and Kirsten Dunst.

“I thought it was fiction,” Spencer says of the upcoming film during the Produced By conference. Spencer opened up about the historical significance of the project, and explained why the story is overdue to be told.

“Hidden Figures” will chronicle how three female African-American mathematicians serve as the brains behind NASA’s Friendship 7 mission. Their calculations helped astronaut John Glenn become the first American to orbit the Earth in February 1962.

READ RELATED NEWS: Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer to Play Mathematicians in ‘Hidden Figures’

“I thought, ‘Wow, this is a great story that needs to be told because we haven’t seen black women from that era portrayed in that way,’” Spencer said at a Produced By 2016 panel about diversity and gender parity in Hollywood.

“When I found out it was true, it hurt me to the core. That they were left out of the retelling of history and they made contributions to history. It’s not just black women, it’s also women. They had an entire department of women,” she said.

TheWrap reports that Spencer spoke on the panel with Paul Feig, Dr. Jo Handelsman, associate director for science at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, producer Lydia Dean Pilcher, “Black-ish” actress Yara Shahidi, director of media and diversity at USC Stacy Smith and global head of diversity at Dropbox, Judith Williams.

“These women were at the backbone of the program, yet we never heard about them,” Handlesman said.

Spencer also spoke about her role as Johanna Reyes in “Allegiant” and the upcoming finale on the “Divergent” series, “Ascendant.”

“I will say that I love the fact that Veronica Roth wrote these books when she was 18, and in this young author’s mind, she not only included women as leaders because the majority of the factions are led by women, but the groups are all multi-faceted and diverse,” she said about the series’ author. “So her idea of the future was made up of many people from multicultural backgrounds.”

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