For audiences of The Help, Octavia Spencer may be one of the most memorable actresses in the film adaptation, which opens today.
Spencer plays the feisty, defiant and determined Minny Jackson. She is one of the African-American domestics persuaded by a young white woman to secretly work with her on a book about their lives in service to white families in Jackson, Miss., in the early 1960s.
Stockett wrote about Minny with Spencer in mind.
Their longtime friend Tate Taylor — who later wrote the screenplay for The Help and directed the movie — brought Spencer and the rest of the cast and crew of his 2003 film Chicken Party to New Orleans to work on the sound mix. Stockett came along.
"She met me on a hot, hungry day," Spencer, 39, recalls with a joyous laugh. "I was about 100 pounds heavier than I am now, and I was dieting. I don't like to be hot, and I was very grumpy because he was taking us on a walking tour of the city.
"So I can honestly say Minny's physicality — of course, her voluptuousness — is based on me, and her sass and her strong will are definitely based on me."
Taylor says Stockett, who was about a year into writing the book, was quietly walking behind them, "watching me and Octavia going toe to toe fighting about the heat, and she said, 'My God, I've been writing this character of Minny, and I think I just spent an afternoon with her.'"
That's where the similarities end and Stockett comes into play, Spencer says. "Minny is a complex ball of emotion. I think she is a Greek chorus. She says what everyone else is thinking."
In The Help, recent college grad and aspiring writer Skeeter Phelan (Emma Stone) approaches Minny's friend, Aibileen Clark (Viola Davis), to talk honestly about cooking and cleaning for white families and raising their children. Aibileen and Skeeter, who compiles a household hints column for the local newspaper, could lose their jobs, their friends, even their lives if the segregationists find out.
Minny says they are irrational. But after the indignities mount for the maids, she joins them and helps recruit others.
Skeeter's childhood friend and college roommate, the influential Junior League president Hilly Holbrook (Bryce Dallas Howard), is appalled that blacks and whites use the same toilets, so she proposes the Home Help Sanitation Initiative that would require white households to have separate bathrooms for black housekeepers.
And Minny, who works for Hilly's mother, is the kind of no-nonsense, sharp-tongued help that Hilly abhors. So she sacks Minny and then spreads the lie that Minny stole her mother's candelabra.
The only job Minny can get is with Celia Foote (Jessica Chastain), an outcast herself who is shunned by the Jackson elite. Minny is suspicious when Celia treats her with respect rather than the usual disdain, but they eventually become unlikely confidantes.
Actress, author bonded
Aibileen speaks first in the book. "The first couple of lines in, I realized (Stockett) had written in this dialect," says Spencer, who was raised in Alabama. "And quite honestly I thought, 'Wow, if this is Mammy from Gone With the Wind, I'm going to have problems.'"
As she continued to read, Spencer found that not all of the characters talked in the same dialect. "She was writing about characters who happened to be from a certain socioeconomic group. They had limited education, but they were the most intelligent people in the book. I applaud her because it gave an authenticity to those voices."
When The Help was published in 2009, Stockett was scheduled for a book tour. "I didn't feel comfortable getting up on stage and reading the African-American voices, so I called up Octavia," she says. "This was before we had thought much about a film. So Octavia went on tour with me and read the voices of the black characters, and I read the white."
Spencer calls it "Thelma and Louise-ing."
"Tate had introduced us several years earlier, but we didn't have that much interaction with each other. Now we were driving across the South to 12 cities. We weren't being lawless, but we bonded those three weeks."
Taylor had met Spencer in the mid-'90s on the set of A Time to Kill. "I delivered time sheets to the office she was working in, and we hit it off and became great friends," he says.
Spencer made her first screen appearance in A Time to Kill. "If you blink, it is all of five seconds. If you don't blink, six."
Since then, she has appeared in many big- and small-screen productions. "For years I've seen Octavia put in movies and television, and when this show or film concludes, I think 'what a waste,'" Taylor says. "They had no idea who they had in their cast, and shame on them for not exploring that."
Spencer had to audition
Taylor has cast her in each of his films: Chicken Party, 2008's Pretty Ugly People and now The Help.
Even though Taylor adapted The Help believing Spencer would be Minny, she had to audition for the part.
"There were so many well-known African-American actresses who could have played the role," she says. "I understand that it was a risky thing (for a studio): This unknown director is going to do this project, and one of the leads is going to be played by this unknown actress."
Taylor and Spencer consider themselves family — brother and sister. And by the time filming began last summer, they had lived together for four years.
"As the director, I would tell her, 'Now just cross over a little faster,' and she would hear, 'Did you take out the garbage?' The hair on her neck would stand up, and then we would realize we had slipped into a roommate dynamic. And we'd start laughing."
Spencer's next movie, Flypaper, with Patrick Dempsey and Ashley Judd, is scheduled for release Aug. 19. She plays a teller at a bank that is robbed twice on the same day.
Spencer got into the film business to be a producer. "I would dabble a bit in the acting, but I really wanted to produce," she says. Spencer is collaborating on a project with her Help castmate Davis and working with producer Brunson Green on an idea for another film.
When not working, Spencer enjoys spending time curled up reading.
"I'm a big mystery buff," she says. "I think if I weren't so squeamish, I would have been some sort of forensic analyst. And I can't do anything with a microscope, because then I start thinking about the world of germs around us.
"So I solve crimes from my armchair. "
But she has played small guest parts on the CBS series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and CSI: New York.
She is cautiously optimistic about the types of projects she will be a part of after The Help. "I'm waiting to see, but my life has changed already in that I got to work with all of these type-A-personality women, and I learned a lot from them in how they get things done."
Taylor's assessment: "The world has no idea what Octavia can do. Just get ready."
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