The role Octavia Spencer deemed “very difficult but a lot of fun”
In these days of seemingly any high-profile actor being plucked from the dramatic or comedic and dropped in media res into a superhero movie, it’s easy to overlook the fact that big action blockbusters require a very different kind of acting. Aside from the frequent requirement of acting alongside green screens and yet-to-be-created CGI, there can be a very physical risk to acting out a fight scene or action set piece. That’s a lesson Academy Award-winning actor Octavia Spencer learned on the set of Korean director Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer.
As she told GQ in an interview breaking down her most iconic film roles back in 2020. Spencer’s career after her film debut in 1996’s A Time to Kill pivoted between television and film, comedy and drama, with notable roles in The Help and Ryan Coogler’s Fruitvale Station. But the chance to work with director Bong, who Spencer has called an auteur, saw her travel out to a studio in Prague to film chaotic crowd scenes in train carriages attached to gimbals to simulate movement.
Based on a French graphic novel, Snowpiercer is a post-apocalyptic polemic about the survivors of a global ice age who have taken refuge on a titanic train which circumnavigates the frozen globe ad infinitum. Spencer joined lead actor Chris Evans as a citizen of the lower class at the back of the train who joins the revolutionary fight to make it to the front and take control from the plutocratic powers that be. It’s a crusade involving her character plunging into the fray, bringing the actor closer to the hopefully simulated violence than she felt comfortable with.
Explaining, “I’m terrified of being hit: so there was a sequence coming up where we are going through a tunnel, and we are fighting the bad guys, but then it gets really dark, and I started having a panic attack because I thought all the lights are going to go out and somebody’s going to hit me for real.”
Spencer said Evans noticed her discomfort and went to the filmmakers to ask whether she really needed to be in the scene, to her great appreciation: “I love him dearly for that because they took me out of the scene. Thank you, Chris.”
It appears Spencer learned a lot from Evans, who had his own stage combat experiences from roles like Captain America in the contemporaneous first Avengers film. To hear her tell it, his balletic stunt work is a thing of beauty.
“I remember the stunt coordinator telling Chris, these two guys are going to confront you, you’re going to take them out, this guy is going to come in from the back, you’ll do a couple of rounds with him, and then you’re gonna finish the last guy off,” she said. “And then Chris does it, and it was the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen. And I was so mad, I said well, how long have you guys been rehearsing that? And he said, well, no – he just told me what he wanted… That’s when I realised that there’s so much more to what we do. Because I’ve been a walk-and-talk actor, largely, and I like being a walk-and-talk actor. It was very difficult but a lot of fun.”
