Octavia Spencer like you’ve never seen her before in ‘Ma’

LOS ANGELES — Octavia Spencer has been a household name for almost a decade. She’s won an Oscar and been nominated two more times since.

And yet she has never headlined a film on her own or been first on the call sheet until now. The film that is righting that wrong is “Ma,” a horror film about a woman who lets the local teenagers party in her basement.

The part was originally written for a white woman, but Spencer’s longtime friend and former roommate Tate Taylor, who also directed her in “The Help” thought this was just what she needed.