Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor is happy to acknowledge that, since emerging from university in the mid-1990s, she has rarely been short of work. It says here that her first professional gig was playing Ariel on Broadway, opposite Patrick Stewart’s Prospero, in The Tempest. What does she remember about that?
“Um ... being scared to death,” she says, laughing.
Each year since then her CV has been packed with credits. You can see her with Cuba Gooding jnr in Men of Honor. She’s in The Help, If Beale Street Could Talk and, opposite Chadwick Boseman’s James Brown, in Get on Up. In the past three or four years, however, her profile has rocketed. The Oscar nomination for playing the Williams sisters’ mom in King Richard helped. Last year she received buckets of acclaim for Ava DuVernay’s Origin and the musical version of The Color Purple. All of a sudden, after 30 years of impressive graft, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor is recognised as among the best of her generation.
Does she regret that didn’t happen earlier?
“I think probably my pocketbook would have appreciated it, you know. Ha ha!” she says. “Some family members probably would have really appreciated me having more opportunities back in the day. But the reality is that I was, for the most part, working consistently. There were definitely dry spots in there. I was in pilots that nobody saw. I was in plays that opened and closed within a few weeks. I was working, but nobody saw those things.”
Now she turns up in one of the most acclaimed films of the current awards season. Someone was always going to turn The Nickel Boys, Colson Whitehead’s 2019 novel, into a film (or maybe a TV series). The fear was that this gripping, disturbing story of life among African-American students at a savage reform school in the 1960s would generate something worthy, respectable and dull. That happens with so many literary adaptations. RaMell Ross’s film could hardly be more daring. The director employs a point-of-view camera throughout – shooting in narrow ratio – to plunge us into the characters’ closed-in world. He intercuts with archive footage. He muddies the narrative. It is really something else.
What did Ellis-Taylor, who plays Patty, the protagonist’s distraught mother, make of the shooting technique? She was essentially addressing a camera that sat where her acting partner would usually be.
“I just accept the fact that I’m not going to be talking to another human being,” she says. “It was a bit of a learning curve. But I think it works, because Patty is very, very isolated. And so I felt isolated. So I think it absolutely helped.”
Patty’s son, a promising student, is falsely accused of car theft and propelled into a regime that brutalises its subjects as it fails to educate them. Did Ross, hitherto a documentarian and academic, explain his decision to use only subjective cameras?
“He wanted to confront not just the kind of stories we’re telling or the lack of telling that story – here’s how African-American children were treated – but also the method of telling those stories,” she says. “The method itself has been complicit in negative ideas and betrayals of African-American children. His way of confronting that is to position the camera in such a way that the viewer is immersed in the experience.”
The story is particular to the African-American experience. It is also depressingly universal. Both book and film flash forward to some time close to the present when stories are emerging of massed graves being discovered near the school. It is impossible not to think of similar reports concerning the Magdalene laundries in Ireland.
“One of the references I have when I talk about Nickel Boys is those mothers in Ireland – and the Catholic Church,” Ellis-Taylor says. “How they were hidden because they were pregnant and what happened to those young girls. It is our responsibility to keep these stories alive, not just because it’s good to know our history but also because now we know that these things are not solved. They are cyclical.”
Like many African-Americans, Ellis-Taylor has family connections with the United States depicted in Nickel Boys. (The film drops the novel’s definite article from its title.) She was born in San Francisco, in California, but raised on her grandmother’s farm in Mississippi during the 1970s. That was the state in which racists murdered young Emmett Till. Memories of the Jim Crow era were still fresh. In 1963 a riot broke out after attempts to integrate the University of Mississippi. I wonder if she drew on her family’s memories of that era when preparing for Nickel Boys.
“When I was actually doing the part I wasn’t really aware of that,” Ellis-Taylor says. “I had to do a job. For me anyway, I feel when it becomes about more than what I’m actually doing in the moment then it can become amorphous. It just scatters. But now that I’m talking about it to journalists I’m able to see that it was something I was tapping into. I was tapping into who my grandmother was.”
I think I’m not the person to ask. I think that it would be interesting if you asked some of my white colleagues that question
There were eerie parallels between Nickel Boys’ plot and an incident from Ellis-Taylor’s own family.
“My grandmother never talked about her experiences,” Ellis-Taylor says. “She rarely talked about the brutality she experienced – not necessarily physical brutality but just how her life was turned upside down because someone arrested her husband for something he didn’t do. She never talked about that to me at all.”
Ellis-Taylor, an enormously friendly woman with a warm sense of humour, honours the women of her family in her own name. As late as 2022 she received her Oscar nomination as Aunjanue Ellis; a year later she attached “Taylor” in honour of her mother. “The love of my life, my mother, gave me my Daddy’s name,” she told Variety at the time. “I was, like, wait a minute, lady, I want your name.”
Ellis-Taylor took a degree in African-American studies at the prestigious Brown University, in Rhode Island. So she plainly had the smarts to go in any number of high-powered directions. What did the family make of her decision to become an actor? That is always a precarious profession to take on.
“I really didn’t talk to them about it,” she says. “My grandmother had passed away. And I was lucky to start working pretty quickly. I think my family didn’t really care as long as I wasn’t asking them for money,” she laughs.
We like to think the industry has made some progress in diversity of representation. People of colour were once conspicuously rare among Oscar nominees. In 2022 Ellis-Taylor lost out on best supporting actress to the Afro-Latino performer Ariana DeBose. Will Smith beat Denzel Washington to best actor (for his own role in King Richard). Does that reflect a real change in casting practices? Does she believe Hollywood is a more welcoming environment for black people than it once was?
“I have a nonconventional answer to that,” she says. “I think I’m not the person to ask. I think that it would be interesting if you asked some of my white colleagues that question. Because the reality is they hold most of the power and they hold most of the money.”
Good response. Actors of colour are always being asked whether their concerns are being addressed. We journalists are less likely to ask the people who need to do the addressing.
“I’m interested in what they have to say. If you ask that question and they say, ‘I don’t know,’ or, ‘It doesn’t matter to me,’ I think that’s the answer,” she says.
Ellis-Taylor is on the awards trail again. Nickel Boys has, with a younger, more alert Oscars electorate in place, a good chance of taking the slot in best picture informally reserved for recent art-house titles such as The Zone of Interest and Drive My Car. Ellis-Taylor could well slip into the best supporting actress race again. She is part of a campaign.
“My God, yeah. It is very strange,” she says, happily bemused. “I feel the fun part was doing the job. Now there is the salesperson part of it. I’m on the politician side of it – and I’m not a politician. My job has mutated into this other thing that I’m not particularly comfortable with. But it is a necessity. Because I want to be a cheerleader for the job, for the story.”
There’s something more. Those who survived and those who perished in cruel institutions such as the one that inspired Nickel Boys.
“Most importantly, I want to be a champion for those children who were ignored for so long and who still are. This is a necessary part of that.”
Nickel Boys is in cinemas from Friday, January 3rd
