The iconic role Octavia Spencer was blocked from inheriting: “I’m glad it didn’t happen”
The 2011 film The Help might not have aged particularly well, but it did make a star out of Octavia Spencer.
For her role as the African-American maid, Minny Jackson, existing in a segregated society whole experiencing the effects of the Civil Rights movement, Spencer was showered with praise and awards, including the Oscar for ‘Best Supporting Actress’.
This was the start of a purple patch in her career that garnered two more Oscar nominations over the next six years, but this success had been a long time coming for Spencer, who had previously auditioned for and missed out on a litany of roles that other people made famous, such as the role of Donna Meagle on Parks and Recreation, which eventually went to Retta.
However, even after she became a household name, she still wasn’t able to get all of her projects over the line, which was the case with a classic detective series reboot. In 2013, it was reported that Spencer was attached to star in Murder, She Wrote, but instead of stepping into the shoes of Jessica Fletcher, the character from the original series immortalised by Dame Angela Lansbury, she would be playing a new part of an amateur novelist who solves crimes on the side.
Sadly for fans of Spencer and sleuthing, the series ran into issues from the get-go, with Lansbury coming out to challenge the use of the title, saying, as reported by the Los Angeles Times, “Murder, She Wrote will always be about a Cabot Cove and this wonderful little group of people who told those lovely stories and enjoyed a piece of that place.”
Just three months after the initial story broke, the reboot was cancelled, and you might think that Spencer would have been devastated at losing out on such an iconic gig, but that simply wasn’t the case.
“There were just too many things that didn’t line up,” she explained to The Independent in 2014, “I’m glad it didn’t happen because I do enjoy having a life, and I became a part of a project that means a lot more to me, so everything happened as it should.”
The project Spencer was referring to was the Fox TV show Red Band Society. Developed by Friends co-creator Marta Kauffman, the series followed a group of teenagers with various illnesses living in the pediatric ward of a hospital. Spencer played the stern nurse-in-charge, Dena Jackson, but a combination of poor reviews and underwhelming ratings led to its cancellation after just one season.
As for Murder, She Wrote, the idea of a reboot never fully went away, and in 2023, it was revealed that a film version was in development with Jamie Lee Curtis in the lead role, Pitch Perfect filmmaker Jason Moore as director, and Phil Lord and Christopher Miller serving as producers, set to be released just in time for Christmas 2027.
