“She wasn’t trying to be the first African-American female engineer,” the actress says as part of “Close Up With TheWrap” video series presented by 20th… “Hidden Figures” star Janelle Monae was one of the people who didn’t know about the three female mathematicians who helped catapult U.S. astronaut John Glenn into space in the 1960s – but that doesn’t mean she wasn’t going to get the story heard. “I had no clue who Mary Jackson was, but I made it a personal responsibility to portray Miss Mary Jackson because I didn’t want any other girl, any other human being, any other American, to not know about this history,” Monae told TheWrap about her role in the film as Jackson, the first African-American female aerospace engineer.