How the Department Heads of ‘Nickel Boys’ Worked with Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor to Create an Unforgettable Character

Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor‘s heartbreaking performance as Hattie, the grandmother of a wrongly incarcerated teenager in “Nickel Boys,” has been justly lauded for its nuance of expression and technical precision. (Ellis-Taylor was required not only to play a complex character under duress, but to do so entirely to the lens to accommodate director RaMell Ross‘ first-person style of narration.) Ellis-Taylor is quick to point out, however, that her work is not hers alone.

Speaking of the work of costume designer Brittany Loar, hair department head Shandrea Williams, and make-up department head Ignacia Soto-Aguilar, Ellis-Taylor told IndieWire, “You don’t see me without seeing their work. Their work is in every frame, and they don’t get the honor and the acknowledgment that they deserve. I had a great script and didn’t have to do a whole lot of outside research, but I’ve got to tell you, 90 percent of your preparation is having the right costumes, having a dope wig, having great make-up — because you don’t have to think about anything.”

For Williams, providing an atmosphere in which an actor can forget about everything except for the character they’re playing is key. “You have to get to know what they need to prepare for work,” she said. “Sometimes, they may come in and want to have a conversation. Sometimes, they just want to have their AirPods in. Sometimes, they want it quiet so that they can get into the mode of the character or read lines, and it’s important that no one takes offense to what they need, because we’re there to create that environment.”

To create Hattie’s hair, Williams looked to pictures of her grandmother for inspiration. “I showed them to RaMell, and he was like, ‘Yeah, exactly,” Williams said. She created a wig that emulated the look of women who slept with sponge rollers in their hair at night and then adjusted it incrementally as the story progressed. “As she aged, we added a little bit of gray hair, and didn’t comb it so much after she started to feel the distance and the pain of her grandson being gone.”

In terms of the costume design, Loar experimented with several different approaches before arriving at Ellis-Taylor’s look. “We went through a few different variations of how we wanted Hattie to be presented to everybody,” she said. “We had done a camera test early on with a stand in and a more traditional idea of what a grandmother would wear and quickly realized that’s not the version of Hattie that we wanted to do. So then we flew in all kinds of other rental things, and with Aunjanue, we explored a few different variations.”

Loar says that meant she and Ellis-Taylor getting together and asking a lot of questions about Hattie. “Does she wear pants, which were not as popular at that time? Does she wear bright colors? Does she mix patterns? How does she dress and why does she dress that way? What is she influenced by? What’s her socioeconomic status? How does she acquire these clothes? Does she make some of them? It was very fun to explore, and once we started filming we had things flying in and were mixing jewelry and adding accessories.”

Although Loar feels research is one of the most exciting parts of her job, she says the most fun part is leaving it behind to finalize a character with the actor. “You do all this research, and it goes out the window as soon as you know who’s cast and what they can actually wear and feel comfortable in,” Loar said, noting that once an actor is cast her job is to make sure that the clothes don’t stifle their performance. “They might think, ‘Now I’m embodying this person, and I don’t feel like she would wear that.’ Or does she feel even better because she’s wearing that? That was an amazing exploration with Aunjanue.”

For the makeup department, there were numerous challenges not only given the first-person narration style — which meant actors like Ellis-Taylor were on screen in unforgiving close-ups for long periods of time, with no cutaways or scene partners — but the necessity of aging characters via prosthetics on a tight budget and schedule. “We were putting on prosthetics and then okay, next scene, they’re coming off and then they’re coming back on,” Soto-Aguilar said. “My goal became to come up with looks that accurately depicted the story, but weren’t distracting to the actor. I didn’t want to pull her for two hours for this.”

Soto-Aguilar created prosthetics for Ellis-Taylor that could be changed over within an hour. “I wanted to minimize touch-ups to not interrupt the flow, because the scenes were so long,” she said. “I felt like any interruption was going to be disrespectful to the process.” Soto-Aguilar was also careful to make the aging effects subtle so that they would show but not distract the audience from the power of Ellis-Taylor’s performance. “We only did it in certain areas of the face. The whole movie is, to me, about the transference of love and how that love from Hattie to [her grandson] gets cut off and she, the whole movie, is just trying to get back to him.”

Ellis-Taylor paid Soto-Aguilar the ultimate compliment when she saw footage from the film and was surprised by her own appearance. “I was like, ‘Is that what my jaw looks like?'” Ellis-Taylor said. “I immediately went and looked in the mirror, and then I realized that she had put a prosthetic on me.” That level of invisibility is something all of the department heads on “Nickel Boys” worked toward (“the best costume design is costume design you don’t even notice,” according to Loar), and Ellis-Taylor credits it with enabling her performance. “RaMell says ‘action,’ and you can open your mouth and just be, because you are physically presented as the character thanks to the great work that these women have done.”