Sneak peek: Unsung heroines at heart of 'Hidden Figures'

Taraji P. Henson admits she's not mathematically or scientifically wired like her real-life character in the film Hidden Figures. So the teacher who gave her an F in precalculus back in the day may be surprised the Empire star is playing unsung heroine Katherine Johnson.

“All the science jargon is a bit overwhelming,” Henson says, laughing. “I look up the terms and I still don’t know what they mean, just like I didn’t know what they meant when I was in high school.”

Directed by Theodore Melfi (St. Vincent), Hidden Figures (in theaters Jan. 13)takes audiences back to the early 1960s to look at a group of female African-American mathematicians at NASA who were America’s secret weapons in staying competitive in the Space Race. Johnson was key not only in helping astronaut John Glenn (Glen Powell) blast off for his historic 1962 mission to orbit the Earth but also bringing him home safe.

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Johnson, Mary Jackson (Grammy-nominated musician Janelle Monáe) and Dorothy Vaughan (Oscar winner Octavia Spencer), who headed up the group of mathematicians at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., all had to battle racial and gender inequality. In one scene in the film, Johnson has to run to the other side of the campus to use the colored bathrooms.  Yet white men such as Glenn and NASA head honcho Al Harrison (Kevin Costner) see what she can do with numbers and trust  her with their important mission.

“NASA didn’t give a crap what gender you were or what race you were,” Melfi says. “If you could do the math, you were valuable.”

Johnson is a math genius with “a mind like John Nash or Stephen Hawking,” the director adds. “She thinks beyond numbers, past numbers, through numbers.”

Spencer’s Vaughan is mechanically inclined and fights for a supervisor title, while Jackson, the first female engineer at NASA, is the youngest of the three and wants justice for her and her co-workers.

Monáe describes her as a sexy, stylish “firecracker” who doesn’t bite her tongue. “There are times when the other two ladies have to stop her from voicing her opinion. But they love her for that.”

These women who carpool to work every day have “a beautiful sisterhood,” Spencer says. “They all have kids, they all have lives beyond NASA and so it’s interesting to see how they all relate to each other.”

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And more so than the racial importance, Spencer feels the story needs to be told “because it’s factual,” she says, and inspiring to little girls of all shapes, sizes and colors.

“We don’t really hit people over the head with the history of racism. We know that story,” Henson adds. Hidden Figures instead is about “how to work through it and rise above it as humanity.”

The actress thinks people will be surprised that it’s not boring. “Science and math, you think, ‘Oh, this is going to be a snooze fest.’ But it’s a really fast-paced film,” says Henson, a fan of historical period pieces.

“It’s very intriguing to me to go back to a time when I wasn’t born and bring it back to life. I’m a geek like that, but don’t give me numbers please.”