Age: 56
female
Octavia Lenora Spencer (born May 25, 1970) is an American actress. She has received various accolades, including an Academy Award, a British Academy Film Award, and a Golden Globe Award, in addition to nominations for two Primetime Emmy Awards. Spencer made her film debut in the 1996 drama A Time to Kill. Following a decade of brief roles in film and television, her breakthrough came in 2011 when she played a maid in 1960s America in the drama film The Help, which won her the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. In ensuing years, she won the National Board of Review Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role in Ryan Coogler's biopic Fruitvale Station (2013), had a recurring role in the CBS sitcom Mom (2013–2015), and starred in the Fox drama series Red Band Society (2014–2015). Spencer's roles as other black women in 1960s America, as Dorothy Vaughan in the biopic Hidden Figures (2016) and a cleaning woman in the fantasy The Shape of Water (2017), earned her two consecutive nominations for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, becoming the first black actress to achieve such feat, as well as the first, and to date only, to be nominated twice after winning. She has since starred in The Divergent Series (2015–16), The Shack (2017), Gifted (2017), Instant Family (2018), Luce (2019), Ma (2019), Onward (2020), and Spirited(2022). She led the Apple TV+ drama series Truth Be Told (2019–2023). She was nominated for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Limited Series or Movie for portraying Madam C. J. Walker in the Netflix miniseries Self Made (2020). As an author, Spencer created the children's book series Randi Rhodes, Ninja Detective. She has published two books in the series: The Case of the Time-Capsule Bandit (2013) and The Sweetest Heist in History (2015). Description above from the Wikipedia article Octavia Spencer, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
Octavia Spencer
Simone Duvalier
for Simone Duvalier in The Black Christ
Suggested by benpopplewell
While there is an official announcement from Paramount Pictures regarding a project specifically about the Haitian dictator Papa Doc Duvalier starring Giancarlo Esposito, the most anticipated title for a supernatural horror project of this nature would likely be the best supernatural horror movie. Unlike past films like The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988), a project with Giancarlo Esposito (known for his chillingly precise villains) would offer a more authentic and terrifying portrayal of the Vodou dictator and the psychological grip he held over Haiti. The plot has the detail about the secret police headquarters of the Tonton Macoute became a temple of fear. High-ranking Macoutes, often chosen from the ranks of Houngans (voodoo priests), conducted rituals where they utilized human sacrifice to consolidate their power. Reports from terrified citizens spoke of skulls piled high in the headquarters—sacred vessels ("voodoo jars") containing the stolen souls of the regime's opponents, as Duvalier began practicing a sinister form of political control. Dissidents were not merely killed; they were poisoned with tetrodotoxin (zombie powder), rendered into a catatonic state, and declared dead. After burial, the Macoutes would dig them up, creating "zombies" who were then used as slave labor or paraded as a horrifying symbol of disobedience.
