Essence magazine gave us quite the gift just in time for Christmas.
The magazine unveiled its February 2017 issue cover and it features none other than the ladies of the highly anticipated Hidden Figures film: Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, and Janelle Monae.
According to Essence:
Writer Karen Good Marable interviewed the film’s leading ladies at different points as they journeyed through Hollywood’s red carpet season – those champagne-fueled weeks of award shows. The Hidden Figures cast will make its first stop at the Screen Actors Guildawards, where they received a nomination for outstanding performance by a cast in a motion picture. (They share the category with the casts of Moonlight, Fences, Manchester by the Sea and Captain Fantastic.)
Although the film deserves its accolades — Marable writes: “If art is a form of resistance, Hidden Figures, is a kind of grenade” — these actresses were anxious to uplift their character’s real stories. Henson tells ESSENCE: “When I was growing up, people told me out of their mouths math and science are for boys. I was told that over and over. Like, no one showed me how to fall in love with numbers. If I had a teacher like Mrs. Johnson, who knows, I might be on the moon.”
Hidden Figures tells the story of Katharine Johnson (Henson), a female Black mathematician who played a crucial part in the first American men being sent to space. It shares how Johnson along with NASA’s first Black supervisor Dorothy Vaughan (Spencer) and NASA’s first Black aerospace engineer Mary Jackson (Monae) broke down racial and gender barriers during the peak of the Jim Crowe laws.
Monae told Essence, “I think they would not have achieved the level of success that they did had they not had one another.”
Hidden Figures hits theaters in Indy on Jan. 6. You can also pick up the issue on Jan. 13.
