On a gilded morning in mid-June, the actress Octavia Spencer, 56, sat at a table in a hotel restaurant in Midtown Manhattan. In a tweed blazer over a snow-white blouse, she radiated a kind of soft, expensive power. Waiters hovered constantly, checking on the quality of her smoked salmon, offering a warm-up of her coffee. Some people become actors because they want people to pay attention to them. Spencer, as she tells it, has never had to try.
“I don’t know that I could ever be invisible,” she said.
Growing up as the sixth of seven children, she had eyes on her constantly. “I didn’t have to fight for attention; I had to fight for what I would like to call sovereignty,” she said. “Which is probably why I have a problem with power, with somebody in charge of me.”
She has won that fight, though it took more than 20 years for Spencer to become a film and series lead, as well as a respected producer. This year she is the co-star and an executive producer of the action comedy “Ride or Die,” premiering Wednesday on Amazon Prime Video, and has narrated and produced a second season of her true crime series, “Lost Women,” on HBO Max.
She has always felt that she deserved this success, even in her years as a casting assistant, even back when she was relegated to a single scene, a single line.
“I wish I could bottle it up and give it to the world, to say you have importance, take up as much space as you want,” she said.
Before I met her, I had Spencer wrong, at least in part. I had charted her previous roles, particularly her decade and a half playing small parts, often women in helping professions — nurses, teachers, waitresses, social workers, domestic workers.
“The people that we have in our lives that facilitate our lives,” was how she described them. “Never the main character.”
These women, doe-eyed and sweet-faced, were typically underestimated, often overlooked. I had assumed, mistakenly, that because this had been Spencer’s experience, too, it had wounded her.
But Spencer is nobody’s victim. If it took the entertainment industry many years to appreciate the range and breadth of her talents, that did not demean her as a performer or a person.
Yes, she had to work for 23 years as an actress before Hollywood made her the clear lead of a film (2019’s suburban horror “Ma”) or series (the Apple TV crime thriller “Truth Be Told,” also 2019). But she understands that as Hollywood’s loss.
“If we allow ourselves to only see people a certain way, then we’re living a very limited life,” she said.
And stardom, even if Spencer believes she merits it, was never exactly her goal. Though she always enjoyed performing, she didn’t think that she could make a career of it. At Auburn University, she majored in English, relegating theater and journalism to minors. But an attraction to show business remained.
After graduation, she began working on film sets in low-level assistant jobs, often in the casting department. In those years, various bosses encouraged her to read for small roles, but she always declined. When she was working on the 1996 legal thriller “A Time to Kill,” she finally felt ready for the risk. She asked the director, Joel Schumacher, for a role, and he gave it to her. She played a nurse, the first of many.
The actress Viola Davis met her not long after, on the set of Steven Bochco’s short-lived medical drama “City of Angels.” Even back then, a decade before they would co-star as domestic workers in the 2011 film “The Help,” for which Spencer won an Oscar, Spencer’s self-possession impressed Davis.
“She doesn’t apologize for herself,” she said. “There’s nothing in her that she’s trying to fit into any sort of mold. That’s a beautiful thing.”
The actress Melissa McCarthy also knew her in those early days. They had a mutual friend in Tate Taylor, who would eventually direct “The Help,” and he used to invite Spencer along to McCarthy’s improv shows. Spencer’s laugh was infectious, contagious — she was often the funniest person in a given room, McCarthy said, mostly because she never forced anything. McCarthy sees a similar ease in Spencer’s performances.
“You feel everything she thinks — you never have to give Octavia a line in a movie where she’s explaining how she’s feeling,” McCarthy said. “It just comes through her. That’s the magic trick.”
In those years, Spencer, who is a bibliophile despite severe dyslexia, would go to garage sales, picking up paperback books and buying the rights on the cheap to any that she thought might make a good movie. None panned out, but she eventually received her first producer credit, in 2013, when she helped raise funds for Ryan Coogler’s first feature film, “Fruitvale Station.” She has since founded a production company, called Orit, that supports varied projects. “Usually something that really and truly resonates with me,” she said.
One of Orit’s first major undertakings was a Netflix mini-series about the early-20th century hair-care mogul Madam C.J. Walker, America’s first self-made female millionaire. Spencer, who starred as Walker, is also self-made, but she doesn’t see a specific parallel.
“How many women do you know who haven’t made their own way?” she said.
Spencer named her company for what one casting director boss, who hadn’t bothered to learn her actual name, called her on her first day. Spencer’s telling of the story is hysterical — she does the woman’s voice, high and demanding as she calls: “Orit! Orit!”
It doesn’t seem entirely an accident that Spencer named her company after an incident in which she was disregarded, but she doesn’t dwell on that. She would later discover that in Hebrew the word “orit” means “light.” That felt right.
“Because I do take on a lot of dark stories, but at the end of them, I hope to bring light and hope,” she said.
Whether in person or onscreen, Spencer seems trustworthy, even comforting, which makes her an ideal steward of potentially upsetting material. That’s largely why Nichelle Tramble Spellman, the creator of “Truth Be Told,” cast her in the lead.
“I knew she would be able to play the dark parts of the character without ever alienating the audience,” she said.
There is darkness to spare in the true-crime shows “Lost Women of Highway 20” (2023) and “Lost Women of Alaska,” which was released in February. Both track serial killers who preyed on women.
Spencer has been fascinated by true crime since childhood. (She read “Helter Skelter,” a chronicle of the Manson murders, at 11 and remembers being terrified by it.) So when she was approached by Matt Robins, of October Films, to narrate the “Lost Women” series, which take a victim-centered approach, she was immediately interested. She approached the work with the goal of returning some dignity to the victims.
“It was about restoring some of who they were in life back to them in death,” she said. The sadness of women and children not being seen, heard or believed, of being denied their full potential, is palpable in her narration. Robins said this tangible empathy is crucial.
“Working in this genre, one can become numb,” he said. “What makes Octavia special is that sense of connection. She meaningfully cares.”
There are lighter tones to “Ride or Die,” a buddy action comedy with a twist — the buddies are women. Spencer stars as Debbie, the American wife of a British member of Parliament. In the first episode, Debbie, a lawyer who has sacrificed her career to her husband’s political ambitions, discovers that her marriage is kaput and that her best friend and fellow book club delinquent, Judith (Hannah Waddingham), is an international assassin.
Soon she and Judith are elegantly on the run. Judith is perhaps the more sparkly role, but Debbie is the show’s heart.
“Some of the show can be very big, things can be heightened,” Tessa Coates, the series creator, said in a video interview. “But because Debbie is our in, and we believe in Octavia, it never feels too much.” Coates described Debbie as the Jessica Fletcher to Judith’s Jason Bourne.
Spencer had done little comedy and even less action before “Ride or Die,” but she found the premise delectable. The idea that a woman in her 50s could discover new skills, could have new adventures, could deepen her relationship with her best friend and maybe enjoy a dalliance or two, this was all tantalizing.
Spencer is adamant that she doesn’t put her own personality into her characters. For her, acting implies a deductive process, a rigorous inquiry into a character’s motivations and psychology.
“You will see artifice if I’m infusing myself in it,” she said.
But she feels closer to Debbie than to anyone she has ever played. They both excel at emotional intelligence, logical reasoning and looking fantastic in a cape.
Spencer is not given to action sequences in her personal life, but she enjoyed the challenge. “Let me just tell you, as a ‘both feet on the floor’ kind of gal, it was exhilarating,” she said.
Waddingham saw and admired this. “She was fearful of the stunt and physical side of her role,” Waddingham said. “But she hit it head on.” (Literally? Sometimes.)
Debbie isn’t a lost woman, but like many of the women Spencer has spent her career playing, she is initially undervalued. Her smarts and charm are mostly ignored. But over the course of the series, she comes into her own, and the world recognizes it. That’s what Spencer wants for herself and for every woman.
“For a woman of a certain age, I feel blessed, I feel seen,” she said. “It was a hard time being seen, but I want to make that possible for all women. I just want that to be the norm.”
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