TThis is a scene in Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor’s new film where she gives a hug unlike any other you’ll ever see on screen. The film is Nickel Boys, an adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s 2019 novel based on the real-life horrors of the Dozier School for Boys in Florida, with Ellis Taylor playing Hattie, the grandmother of Elwood (Ethan Herriss), a boy imprisoned there. In the scene, she is prevented from visiting her missing grandson, but she does meet a friend of his (Brandon Wilson), who becomes a kind of emotional proxy.
But what makes this embrace so special is not just the intensity of the human moment, but the way it captures the power of the first-person perspective, which director Rammell Ross uses throughout his film. When watching it, the viewer feels as if he or she is in Hattie’s arms. “Ramil is a scientist, do you know what I mean?” “She was a lively sight this morning, with her short, bleached hair, red lipstick and warm, inviting manner,” says Ellis Taylor.
I have admired Bruce from afar, ever since I watched Hale County’s first expressive and profound documentary This Morning, This Evening, about black life in rural Alabama. “There is lyricism in the piece, but there is also a great deal of thought and questioning. It is not enough to just tell the story. Rammell asks us to interrogate how The story is told when it comes to black pain.
Ellis Taylor fully appreciated the director’s vision, but that didn’t make shooting the scene any easier. In order to achieve the audience effect of looking through the hero’s eyes, she had to perform directly in front of the camera. “I was used to being able to see the person I was with in the scene, and I couldn’t look into Brandon’s beautiful, gorgeous eyes and feel something in response to his vulnerability,” she says, recalling that day. . “I just had to look at it before Ramil said the word ‘action’, the hour of it, and remember it.”
Ellis-Taylor’s real life doesn’t look much like her character on Nickel Boys, but she’s certainly known a few Hatties in her time. “I realized Hattie was my grandmother,” she says. “Women like my grandmother never talked about their lives, and she was heroic, you know? She had seven children, one of whom died… She suffered a lot.”
The Hug, as it will be known from now on, is further evidence of the role played by Ellis Taylor. The San Francisco-born star has been working steadily since the ’90s — a cop show here, a Broadway play there, as well as interesting film roles opposite stars like Cuba Gooding Jr. (Men of Honor, 2000) and Jamie Foxx (Ray). , 2004) — but, if she’s being honest, the acting didn’t quite feel like it was calling to her at the time. “I wasted a lot of time,” she says with a wry smile. “The only reason I keep going is because I keep getting a job.”
But in the past few years, something has changed. She traces the turning point to 2019, when she played a struggling mother in Ava DuVernay’s When They See Us, a Netflix dramatization of the Central Park Five’s miscarriage of justice, which was followed a year later by a segment in the time-traveling, Afro-esque thriller. – A future warrior in HBO’s horror adventure series Lovecraft Country. Ellis Taylor began being offered roles that aligned with her values. “When it started to matter to me, I realized I could use this acting work to support other important things,” she says.
In 2022, she received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress for her role as the Williams sisters’ mother, Oracene Price, in the sports drama King Richard. Then in 2023, Ellis Taylor teamed up with director DuVernay to star in Origin, an ambitious adaptation of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson’s book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents that is an archival history of racial violence, from transatlantic slavery to slavery across the Atlantic Ocean. Concentration camps in Europe in the 1940s. At the age of 54, this was Ellis Taylor’s first major role in a major stage show.
It is no coincidence, then, that much of Ellis Taylor’s best work is set during an earlier historical campaign for black liberation. Although she was raised in the American South by two black women – her mother and grandmother – she was not yet alive at the time of most of the events depicted in Nickel Boys, Or Fannie, the short drama about civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer. Still, it seemed close enough: “By the time we were coming around, they had only been legally separated for a few years, really. They never talked about it.”
The “they” she refers to are the generations of black Southerners—including her own family—who endured life under the constant threat of racist terrorism. Her grandfather, for example, was a pastor at Society Hill Baptist Church in Macomb, Mississippi, which was also the site of a school. When the Ku Klux Klan firebombed the church in 1964, he was wrongfully arrested for the crime, although nine white men later confessed.
“The truth is, we live with the sons and daughters of the men who dragged my grandfather to prison that night,” Ellis Taylor says. “They are our neighbors. The people who bombed his church… We go to the pharmacy with these people. Nothing ever happened to them and he is still very much present.”
For her part, Ellis Taylor has long called for the continued use of the Confederate flag in public places, contributing commentary and even paying for it. Controversial billboard To shed light on this issue. In 2020, the campaign scored a major victory when Mississippi’s official state flag was redesigned without the canton of the Confederate battle flag, which has been included since 1894. The fight continues. In December 2023, Ellis Taylor walked out of a restaurant after ordering, in protest of a Confederate flag hanging on the wall.
She now realizes how her acting can complement her activism. In fact, it goes deeper than that: “I think acting probably saved me from prison,” she says. truly? Why were they going to put it away? There is a brief silence while Ellis Taylor supposedly calculates the statute of limitations on various crimes. “I won’t tell you that,” she said at last. “I’d just like to say that I’ve been arrested several times for… white people in Mississippi call it ‘being an instigator.’ And I think if I couldn’t filter my insistence on justice, and the rage I feel at the lack of it, through… [acting work]Maybe I would live a more dangerous life.
This helps explain Ellis Taylor’s comfort with being outspoken in the relatively low-stakes context of Hollywood. You may lose the opportunity to audition for criticizing, as you did, the erasure of black gay desire in 2023’s The Color Purple, or, as you also did, pushing for higher pay for actors. King Richard. But no one will put you in prison. “I don’t see it as courage, I see it as common sense… I feel like if we see something wrong and don’t say anything, then we’re complicit. And I don’t want to go to bed at night feeling that way.”
After coming out as bisexual in 2022, she would like to play more queer characters: “Oh my God, girl, yes! Can I, pleaseBut since screenplays aren’t forthcoming, she’s writing her own, including one about the “brilliant, dazzling” rock ‘n’ roll pioneer, Sister Rosetta Tharpe.
Meanwhile, Ellis Taylor, with her youthful looks, mischievous laugh and frequently deployed side eye, seems to have little in common with the reserved, reserved women she often plays on screen. However, she says these roles are the real source of her professional pride: “I majored in African American studies at an Ivy League university, but I had never heard of Fannie Lou Hamer — you know, one of the most important figures in politics.” American history, who happens to be a black woman. So this kind of work is my way of responding to revisionism.
These are her characters, the people she wants to make proud; Black women who had to postpone their desires and suppress their rebellious spirits for the next generation, or even the next life. Now, through Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, they are finally getting their due.
Nickel Boys is in cinemas from January 3.