Octavia Spencer has been following true crime stories since she was just 11 years old.
Speaking at Deadline’s Contenders: The Nominees Studio, Spencer said, “I think there are a lot of people who are very new to the true crime genre. I’m not, I’ve been studying it. I read a horrible story, a true crime story, when I was 11 and I think it made an indelible mark on me.”
Spencer is Emmy-nominated for narrating the true crime Lost Women docuseries, which gives voice to murdered and disregarded women. She was previously Emmy-nominated for Lost Women of Highway 20 and now, with Lost Women of Alaska, the producer and narrator tells the story of a series of brutal, underreported crimes against indigenous women in Alaska.
Watch the Contenders conversation below, and scroll down for more photos from the event.
“We had a brilliant filmmaker in Christina Douglas,” Spencer said, “so I chose to not view the footage as it was being assembled. And I waited until everything was assembled and it was easier then, because the stories were so haunting, but they were also very empowering. So, I was able to imbue the narrative with what I felt that was being portrayed on screen.”
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Spencer had founded production company Orit Entertainment in 2019. She said, “I thought it was the right time for Orit to explore these stories and to try to offer closure. And ‘closure’ is such a strange word, because when you lose a loved one so violently, when you lose a loved one and you don’t have any idea what happened to them, I doubt that you can get closure. But at least to resolve what happened to some of these women, I felt it was incumbent upon me as a citizen of the world to be a part of that, having that access and allowing the families to have access to resources. And Lost Women of Highway 20 and now of Alaska is a small means to do so.”
Spencer says filmmaker Douglas wanted to very much focus mostly on the women rather than talking about the criminals. “Christina Douglas, our director who also happens to be a woman of indigenous descent, suggested, and we also agree, that maybe we focus on the narrative and not name the criminal as much, but say the names of the women as many times as possible and showcase the family members who were coming forward, and re-engage the narrative to be about the women whose voices were stolen.”
Octavia Spencer
Anthony Avellano for Deadline
In working through the material and preparing to literally give voice to the women with her narration, Spencer said, “I still feel rage because these women were still being targeted and there was a suspect right out there in the open. When we look at Alaska, this man left his home country because he knew that he could go to Alaska and do all of these criminal acts and have less visibility. Think about that. We go on vacation to get away and to think that someone targeted a specific community to commit crimes, and then it was actually bolstered by the fact that the police did not investigate… There were over 1300 missing women from the indigenous community and very little law enforcement help. There were systemic failures, not only with police department, but within a society that would even allow this to happen.”
Spencer hinted that her next installment of the Lost Women series might look at Hollywood. “I don’t know if that’s happening, but we’ll see,” she said. “Sadly, there are so many places that we could go, so many women who’ve been harmed.”
