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Talk about a surprise. When Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor (who has been acting professionally since her debut as Ariel in 1995’s Broadway revival of “The Tempest” opposite Patrick Stewart) arrived on the Louisiana set of “Nickel Boys” (Amazon/MGM/Orion), her documentarian-turned-feature-director RaMell Ross told her to do something she had never done before: Look straight into the lens, without a reverse angle on her co-star. She couldn’t see her fellow actors because their faces were obscured by the camera, just as their faces were hidden from the audience.
Watching the lauded critical hit “Nickel Boys” requires an adjustment to a strict point-of-view aesthetic. But Taylor-Ellis had to make it work on the ground, on the fly. The tightly scheduled period feature (budgeted at $20 million) left little time to figure it out.
Reactions range widely to this avant-garde Colson Whitehead adaptation about a brutal southern school for boys, but among the “Nickel Boys” ensemble, the luminous performer who broke through multiple barriers to reach the audience is Ellis-Taylor as Hattie. She is the heart of the film. She loves her incarcerated teenage grandson Elwood (Ethan Herisse) and keeps trying to find out what is going on at his segregated reform school. Without her, “Nickel Boys” might not resonate with audiences. Ellis-Taylor is nominated for Supporting Actress at the Critics Choice Awards (January 12, the day Oscar nomination ballots are due).
Although Ellis-Taylor accompanied the film to festivals in Telluride and New York, she has never watched more than a few minutes. She was nervous about how the movie would play. “Because I care about this film,” she said. “I care about the people involved in it. I care about the young men, the children that this happened to at the Dozier school. I wanted us to bear witness to what happened to them, and do it in a way that people would feel challenged to make sure something like this does not ever happen again.”
She never looks at her own projects. “I protect myself a lot, because I always want to keep my mind focused on why I do what I do,” she said. “I never want to have a consumerist mind about what I’m doing. And immediately, when I go see a film that I’m in, I become a consumer. And I don’t want to feel that way. That’s why I don’t want anybody telling me about reviews. I don’t want to know: ‘Is it number five on Hulu or number one on Hulu?’ I want my experience of doing this work, naively so, I want it to be about the art, never want that to cease, because then it’s not fun anymore.”
When Ellis-Taylor first read the script by Ross and producer Jocelyn Barnes, she didn’t know how they were going to shoot the film. “I felt like the stage directions were underwritten,” she said. “It was just the mistake of a novice filmmaker. Like, ‘He didn’t know that he needed to write this.’ But I’ve done movies before: ‘I’ll tell him.’ That’s what I had in my mind. But I came to work and got a rude awakening.”
When the actress told her director, “You’ll get that when you get the other side,” he said, “There won’t be another side. Just you, ma’am.” She said, “Yo, what?”
It was disorienting. “There was no time, and they didn’t have a lot of money,” she said. “It was not a lot of hours that I could figure it out. It was fight or flight. And I did. I had to fight and flight. I had to do all of that. I didn’t have time to think about it. He told me, ‘This is what’s going to happen.’ And then I went into, ‘OK, how do I make this work? How? What do I do here to make it work?'”
‘Nickel Boys’Courtesy of Orion PicturesEllis-Taylor had been playing supporting roles in film and television for 25 years before her Oscar nomination for playing the mother of Serena and Venus Williams in “King Richard.” It’s hard to pick a breakout before that among all her many performances. “Nobody saw them,” she said. When she had proximity to other stars in 2011’s “The Help,” she discerned some pick-up in attention. “Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer spread the word, too.”
She’s experienced setbacks on high-expectation films like Sundance Searchlight 2016 pick-up “Birth of a Nation,” which was scuttled by Nate Parker’s #MeToo scandal. “It was certainly a disappointment,” she said. “I believe in that film, because folks need to know about who Nat Turner is, period.”
On Barry Jenkins’ “If Beale Street Could Talk,” she enjoyed collaborating with Regina King and Colman Domingo. “I’m the queen of playing the small part,” she said. “But that’s never bothered me. What usually happens is I have a job that pays my rent, that nobody sees, and then I do these little small roles that are interesting and fascinating and fun.”
More people have seen such series as Emmy-nominated “Lovecraft Country” (2020) and “Justified: City Primeval” (2024) starring Timothy Olyphant. “I liked playing this complicated woman,” she said, “who was being pulled in a lot of different directions. And you didn’t necessarily know what her moral code was. And that’s a lot of fun for me.”
Ellis-Taylor had no idea that “King Richard” would pull her into the Oscars orbit. But she did push to beef up her role. “When I found out what Miss Oracene [Price] was to Venus and Serena, I was embarrassed that I did not know that she trained Serena to play tennis. They had outside coaches, but their basic training they did themselves. Most people think of her as being this devoted mother who was always at their tournaments. But no, she’s in those stands giving coaching. I compared that knowledge to what was in that scene originally, and I said, ‘No. I need to see the fullness of this woman, this impact that she had, and how she engineered the lives of these children. And as a wife.’ She wasn’t just their coach. She was their costume designer. She was doing their iconic hairstyles. She shaped how we think of Venus. And Serena came out of that woman’s mind and imagination, and I wanted to give her full credit for that.”
Aunjanue Ellis as Oracene Price in ‘King Richard’Warner Bros.When Ellis-Taylor landed a lead role in a major movie, Ava DuVernay’s “Origin” (Neon, 2023) based on Isabel Wilkerson’s bestseller “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents,” she took on a sexy, attractive, professional academic and author who moves through the world with authority and grace with a supportive and hunky husband (Jon Bernthal) to boot. Wilkerson is fashionable, smart, articulate, someone people listen to. A fantasy role. “I usually am playing women who put other people first, at least in their homes,” said Ellis-Taylor. “They’re putting the lives of their children first, or their communities first. Isabel Wilkerson definitely was putting her community first. She navigated the world with style and brilliance. That’s very satisfying to me.”
But the movie’s box office ($5 million worldwide) and slim awards profile were disappointing for a well-reviewed movie with high expectations. “Our resources were limited,” said Ellis-Taylor. “It was strange, especially now, because so many people are coming up to me and saying ‘Origin’ was one of their favorites. ‘Where were you? We needed you nine months ago!’ Ava DuVernay had tremendous expectations, because she wanted that film to work beyond just the experience of someone seeing it in a cinema. That’s why it was important for her, for me, and for a whole lot of other people.”
It’s not just “Origin.” Ellis-Taylor is often depressed by a central problem for Black-themed movies: the lack of resources applied to their production and release, from “Origin” to Sundance hit “Exhibiting Forgiveness.” “Even if they do have a studio behind them, they don’t get the money,” she said. “They don’t get those chances.”
Next up: A supporting role in the film adaptation of Todd Connor’s autobiographical novel “Liz Here Now” about an abused young man during the Civil Rights era, and a small role in Rod Lurie’s war movie “Lucky Strike.” “I always do small parts,” she said, “and I’m good with that.”
And she’s writing scripts. One is about ’60s freedom fighter Fannie Lou Hamer, to be produced by Roger Ross Williams’ One Story Up Productions. “She was the mind and the body behind the freedom rights movement that birthed itself in Mississippi in the ’60s. So now we’ve got to get money. I’m going to die trying to make it happen.”
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