Actress Octavia Spencer accepts the Best Supporting Actress Award for ‘The Help’ onstage during the 84th Annual Academy Awards held at the Hollywood & Highland Center on February 26, 2012 in Hollywood, California.
Photo: Kevin Winter/Getty Images
The Hollywood Reporter says Octavia Spencer and Michael B. Jordan are both in talks to join Fruitvale, an indie drama about a racially charged Bay Area shooting in 2009. Jordan would play Oscar Grant, an unarmed black man who was detained by BART police on New Year’s Eve and then shot in the back by a policeman who was sentenced to only two years for the crime, sparking protest and riots. Spencer is in talks to play Grant’s mother, and to judge from the heated national conversation about the Trayvon Martin shooting, this project has the potential to be even more controversial than The Help, which Spencer recently won the Oscar for.