Here’s how a scene from The Help featuring a chocolate pie with an off-recipe ingredient gave cinema its classiest gross out gag. Directed by Tate Taylor, period drama The Help was adapted from Kathryn Stockett’s debut novel of the same name and released in 2011. Set in civil rights era Jackson, Mississippi, the film stars Emma Stone as Eugenia ‘Skeeter’ Phelan – a recent university graduate and aspiring writer who decides to write a book about the hardships of being a black maid in 1960s Mississippi.
Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer play two maids named Aibileen and Minny who help Skeeter write her book by volunteering their experiences working as ‘the help’ for white families. Being the Deep South in the 1960s, many of Aibileen and Minny’s experiences and those of their fellow maids are awful. At one point in The Help, Aibileen recounts how her son tragically died after his white boss mercilessly dumped him outside a black-only hospital following a workplace accident. Another scene shows how Constantine (Cecily Tyson) – the maid that raised Skeeter – was fired by her mother Charlotte (Allison Janney, Mom) after years of service so she could save face in front of her snobby, racist friends.
Another injustice comes when Octavia Spencer’s character Minny is fired by her awful racist boss Hilly Holbrook (Bryce Dallas Howard, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom) after using the family bathroom rather than the maid’s outhouse during a violent thunderstorm. Adding insult to injury, Hilly proceeds to go around town accusing Minny of stealing from her, making her virtually unemployable. However, Hilly’s horrible actions do inspire Minny to get revenge in what is surely the classiest gross out gag scene in cinema history.
The scene in question sees Minny visit her former employer with one of her famous, delicious chocolate pies under the guise of apologizing for her so-called transgression. Hilly can’t resist and helps herself to two slices, wolfing it down until Minny informs her she baked an extra ingredient into the pie – her own poop. Is it disgusting? Yes. Is a befitting punishment for a villain like Hilly? Most definitely.
The Help pie scene certainly had a lasting effect on Octavia Spencer, who went on to win an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for her performance. In an interview with People in 2016, Spencer stated she’d had a hard time looking at chocolate pie in the same way since filming The Help but had this to say of the infamous scene and Minny’s revenge against Hilly: “To somebody that awful, that mean, that hateful, it is the best revenge and the most fun I’ve ever had in any given moment on a set”.
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