Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor Says Acting Has Saved Her

There is a scene in Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor’s new film in which she gives a hug unlike any other hug you’ll see on screen. The film is Nickel Boys, an adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s 2019 novel based on the real-life horror of Florida’s Dozier School for Boys, with Ellis-Taylor playing Hattie, the grandmother of Elwood (Ethan Herisse), a boy incarcerated there. In the scene, she is prevented from visiting her much-missed grandson, but encounters a friend of his (Brandon Wilson), who becomes a kind of emotional proxy.

What makes this hug so special, though, is not just the intensity of the human moment, but the way it exemplifies the power of the first-person perspective, which director RaMell Ross utilises throughout his film. Watching it, you the viewer feel as if you are also being enveloped in Hattie’s arms. “RaMell is a scholar, you know what I mean?” says Ellis-Taylor, an enlivening sight this morning, with her cropped, bleached hair, red lipstick and warmly engaging manner.

She had admired Ross from afar, ever since seeing his debut, the expressionistic and profound documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening, about the lives of Black people in rural Alabama. “There’s lyricism in the piece, but there’s also a great deal of thought and interrogation. It’s not enough to just tell the story. RaMell is demanding that we interrogate how the story is told, when it’s about Black pain.”

Ellis-Taylor fully appreciates her director’s vision, but that didn’t make shooting the scene any easier. In order to achieve the audience effect of looking through a protagonist’s eyes, she had to perform directly into camera. “I’m used to being able to see the person I’m in the scene with, and I couldn’t look into Brandon’s lovely, lovely eyes, and feel something as a response to his vulnerability,” she says, recalling that day. “I just had to look at him before RaMell said ‘action’, clock that, and remember it.”

The real-life Ellis-Taylor isn’t much like her Nickel Boys character, but she has certainly known a few Hatties in her time. “I’ve realised that my Hattie was my grandmother,” she says. “Women like my grandmother never talked about their lives, and she was heroic, y’know? She had seven children, one of them died … She went through a lot.”

The Hug, as it shall henceforth be known, is further evidence of the roll Ellis-Taylor is on. The San Francisco-born star has been working steadily since the 1990s – a cop show here, a Broadway play there, plus movie love-interest roles opposite stars such as Cuba Gooding Jr. (Men of Honour, 2000) and Jamie Foxx (Ray, 2004) – but, if she’s honest, acting didn’t exactly feel like her calling back then. “I squandered a lot of time,” she says with a wry smile. “And the only reason that I continued is because I continued to get hired.”

In the last few years, however, something changed. She dates the turning point to 2019, when she played a campaigning mother in Ava DuVernay’s When They See Us, a Netflix dramatisation of the Central Park Five miscarriage of justice, which was followed a year later by a part as a time-travelling, Afro-futurist warrior in HBO’s horror-adventure series Lovecraft Country. Ellis-Taylor had begun to be offered roles that aligned with her values. “When it started to matter to me was when I realised I could use this acting work to subsidise the other things that are important,” she says.

In 2022, she picked up a best supporting actor Oscar nomination for playing the Williams sisters’ mother, Oracene Price, in 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 represented a potted history of racial violence, from transatlantic slavery to the concentration camps of 1940s Europe. At age 54, it was Ellis-Taylor’s first lead role in a major theatrical release.

It is not coincidental then that so much of Ellis-Taylor’s best work is set during a previous historic push for Black liberation. Though she was raised in the American south by two Black women – her mother and grandmother – she wasn’t yet alive at the time of most of the events depicted in Nickel Boys, or Fannie, her short drama about civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer. Still, it felt close enough: “By the time we were coming up, they were only a few years out of legal segregation, really. They just never talked about it.”

The “they” she’s referring to is the generations of Black southerners – her own family included – who endured life under the constant threat of racist terrorism. Her grandfather, for instance, was a pastor at Society Hill Baptist Church in McComb, Mississippi, which was also the site of a school. When the church was firebombed by the KKK in 1964, he was unjustly arrested for the crime, although nine white men later confessed.

“The reality is we live with the sons and daughters of the men who dragged my grandfather off to jail that night,” says Ellis-Taylor. “They are our neighbours. The people who bombed his church … We go to the drugstore with these people. Nothing ever happened to them. It’s still very much present.”

For her own part, Ellis-Taylor has long called out the continued use of the Confederate flag in public spaces, contributing comment pieces and even paying for a controversial billboard to highlight the issue. In 2020 the campaign secured a significant victory when the official state flag of Mississippi was redesigned without the Confederate battle flag canton, which had been included since 1894. Still the fight continues. In December 2023, Ellis-Taylor walked out of a restaurant after ordering, in protest at the Confederate flag hung on the wall.

She now recognises how her acting might complement her activism. Actually, it goes deeper than that: “I kind of think that perhaps acting has saved me from jail,” she says. Really? What would they have put her away for? There is a short silence, while Ellis-Taylor presumably calculates the statute of limitations on various crimes. “I’m not gonna tell you that,” she says at last. “I would just say that I have gotten arrested a couple times for … the white people in Mississippi call it ‘being an agitator’. And I think if I hadn’t been able to filter my insistence on justice, and the rage that I feel because of the lack of it, through [acting work], I would have had a more dangerous life, probably.”

This helps explain Ellis-Taylor’s comfort with being outspoken in the relatively low-risk context of Hollywood. You might lose an audition opportunity for – as she has done – criticising the erasure of Black lesbian desire in 2023’s The Colour Purple or, as she has also done, pushing for a cast-wide pay-rise on King Richard. But no one will put you in jail. “I don’t see it as courage, I see it as common sense … I feel like, if we see something wrong and we don’t say anything, then we’re participants. And I don’t want to go to bed at night feeling that way.”

Having come out as bisexual in 2022, she’d love to play more queer characters: “Oh my God, girl, yes! Can I, please?” But since the scripts aren’t forthcoming, she’s writing her own, including one about the “fascinating and dazzling” rock’n’roll pioneer, Sister Rosetta Tharpe.

In the meantime, Ellis-Taylor, with her youthful looks, mischievous laugh and much-deployed side-eye, seems to have little in common with the matronly and reserved women she often plays on screen. Yet these roles, she says, are her true source of professional pride: “I majored in African American studies at an Ivy League university, but I’d never heard of Fannie Lou Hamer – y’know, one of the most essential figures in American history, who happens to be a Black woman. So this kind of work is my way of responding to redaction.”

These are her characters, the people she wants to make proud; Black women who had to defer their own desires and repress their rebellious spirits for the next generation, or until the next life. Now, through Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, they are finally getting their due.

Nickel Boys is in cinemas from 3 January.