Octavia Spencer Says Upcoming Drama ‘Hidden Figures’ Is Not a ‘Black Film’ [Video]

Uncovering a Tale of Rocket Science, Race and the ’60s

Taraji P. Henson and Octavia Spencer star in “Hidden Figures,” a largely untold story of African-American mathematicians in the space program.

“This is a female-driven movie about contributions that women really made,” Spencer told The New York Times about the 2017 film focusing on four black female NASA mathematicians in the 1960s.

When "Hidden Figures" hits the big screen next January, audiences across the nation will see the true story of the African American women mathematicians who were behind one of NASA's first successful space missions. Henson stars as Katherine Johnson, Monáe as Mary Jackson, and Spencer as Dorothy Vaughan.

"This is a female-driven movie about contributions that women really made, to our world, not just our society. That’s a big statement.”- Octavia Spencer

Taraji, Janelle, and Octavia, thank you for using your platform and talent to bring an important story in U.S. history to life. We can't wait to see it!

"Hidden Figures" is set to hit theaters January 13, 2017. 

First photos of Janelle Monáe, Taraji P. Henson, and Octavia Spencer in Fox 2000's "Hidden Figures". 

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ATLANTA — Taraji P. Henson hates math, and Octavia Spencer has a paralyzing fear of calculus, but that didn’t stop either actress from playing two of the most important mathematicians the world hasn’t ever known.

Both women are starring in “Hidden Figures,” a forthcoming film that tells the astonishing true story of female African-American mathematicians who were invaluable to NASA’s space program in the Jim Crow South in the early 1960s.

Ms. Henson plays Katherine Johnson, a math savant who calculated rocket trajectories for, among other spaceflights, the Apollo trips to the moon. Ms. Spencer plays her supervisor, Dorothy Vaughan, and the R&B star Janelle Monáe plays Mary Jackson, a trailblazing engineer who worked at the agency, too.

Slated for wide release in January, the film is based on the book of the same title, to be published this fall, by Margot Lee Shetterly. The author grew up knowing Ms. Johnson in Hampton, Va., but only recently learned about her outsize impact on America’s space race.

“I thought, oh my God, what is this we’re hearing here?” Ms. Shetterly said, recalling the moment a few years back when her father, a retired research scientist, casually mentioned Ms. Johnson’s life work. Her next thought: Why haven’t we heard about it before?

“Hidden Figures” comes as Hollywood is under mounting pressure to diversify its offerings after this year’s much criticized largely all-white Oscars race. And, while this picture has been in the works for several years, and the corresponding book for years before that, its filmmakers know it will invariably be lumped into post-#OscarsSoWhite chatter.

“It’s not a reactionary movie,” said Ted Melfi, the film’s director, “but it will be seen as one, which is unfortunate.”

Its evolution began two years ago, when the producer Donna Gigliotti, who won an Academy Award for “Shakespeare in Love,” made an offer on the book’s rights a day after reading Ms. Shetterly’s proposal.

For Ms. Gigliotti, the “Hidden Figures” story line had everything and more: the Cold War, the space race, the damages of segregation and racial and gender inequality, all set against the country’s burgeoning civil rights struggles.

Desperate to get ahead of the Russians, the nation’s space agency had hired the brainiest people it could find, among them Ms. Johnson, who, in 1937, graduated from college in West Virginia summa cum laude at 18. But, for years at the agency, women often worked in separate rooms from men, and the white women were segregated from the black women, who were known as “colored computers.” Ms. Johnson’s push to be heard by the men — her calculations, once they heeded her, proved invaluable — lies at the film’s narrative core.
The two women, along with Ms. Monáe, developed deeper bonds during production and know they will all invariably be repeatedly asked about how “Hidden Figures” plays into the broader conversation around diversity in Hollywood. That question caused something close to resignation to come over both Ms. Henson and Ms. Spencer.

“I hate when I do a film, and it has a lot of African-Americans and they call it a black film,” Ms. Henson said. “I don’t wake up and go, ‘Let’s see, this weekend, I’m going to see a Chinese film, I’m going see a black film, no I’m going see a white film with a black person in it.’ Who does that?”

Ms. Spencer said that labeling the film was not just a turnoff for some audiences, but also unfairly reductive. NASA’s largely unrecognized female mathematicians were black and white, she said, and this story, told from the perspective of three black women, paid homage to them all.

“This is a female-driven movie about contributions that women really made, to our world, not just our society,” Ms. Spencer said. “That’s a big statement.”

Hidden Figures: The African American Women Mathematicians Who Helped NASA and the United States Win the Space Race: An Untold Story by Margot Shetterly will be released in 2016. Most Americans have no idea that from the 1940s through the 1960s, a cadre of African-American women formed part of the country’s space work force, or that this group—mathematical ground troops in the Cold War—helped provide NASA with the raw computing power it needed to dominate the heavens. Ms. Shetterly has been researching the role of the women for several years, primarily at NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, VA. This presentation on her research was given at Langley in March 2014.