From the outside looking in, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor has the kind of career many actors covet. Her résumé boasts memorable roles on screens big and small, many as part of A-list ensembles (see: “The Help,” “Ray,” “When They See Us”). And then there’s the critical acclaim she has received in the form of an Oscar nomination and two Emmy nods.
The actor has worked steadily for nearly 30 years in a variety of challenging projects. “I think you could probably look at the stuff that I’ve been in and there’s no rhyme or reason to it,” she says. “Most of the work that I’ve done, I haven’t been the lead, and that’s never mattered. It’s always been the character.”
It makes sense then that the character that earned Ellis-Taylor her supporting actress Oscar nomination for “King Richard” is based on a real-life force of nature, Oracene Price, mother of tennis players Venus and Serena Williams. Since that film’s release, the actor has appeared in two prestige drama series and six films — four of which were released this year. “I don’t have a ton of scripts sitting around that I can pick and choose from, that’s not my life,” she says. But the Oscar nomination “does have power. I think no matter what, it helps people turn to the movie that you’re in. And I want that to happen.”
The actors made it a point to give each parent credit for helping to shape tennis stars Venus and Serena Williams.
Growing up on her grandmother’s farm in Magnolia, Miss., Ellis-Taylor “never had any designs on being an actor,” because it didn’t seem like a possibility. “I am a child of the rural South. There’s no template for what I’m doing. We were living in poverty. You don’t want to choose a profession that would contribute or extend that; you want to break that,” she says. And yet, the self-described “strange child,” who always asked tons of questions and loved escaping into other worlds via novels, textbooks and atlases from her grandfather’s study, went on to earn a master’s degree in acting from New York University and booked her first professional role on Broadway opposite Patrick Stewart in a revival of “The Tempest.”
“I’m going to be honest and say my training has come from being on sets,” says Ellis-Taylor. “What NYU prepared me for was a lot of the frustrations that I had to ultimately handle in the real world. And one of those frustrations is that I wasn’t physically right to be a leading lady. I remember this teacher telling me, ‘I want your hair to be pretty.’ And I said, ‘But my hair is pretty.’ I didn’t think of my hair as being pretty, but here was this woman telling me that me, as I am, was not sufficient. And I knew that that was wrong because my white classmates weren’t told that.”
Playing a pivotal role in the film adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s novel about foster school abuse, Ellis-Taylor advocates for cinema that is not “palliative.”
Ellis-Taylor frequently works within ensembles or as a supporting player, which she explains as a drive to portray interesting people no matter the size of the role. Her latest work includes “Exhibiting Forgiveness,” Titus Kaphar‘s feature directing debut, and “Nickel Boys,” RaMell Ross’ adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s acclaimed novel about the friendship between two Black boys at a brutal Florida reform school in the early 1960s.
“I finally got to work with RaMell Ross and Titus,” she says. “They are artists who have a whole other life outside of filmmaking, RaMell as a photographer and a writer, thinker and professor, and Titus is a visual artist.”
“Exhibiting Forgiveness” premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year and opened in theaters in October. “Nickel Boys” opens in Los Angeles on Dec. 20. Ellis-Taylor, who plays two very different matriarchal characters in the films, is eager for audiences to experience Ross’ deeply affecting work, primarily told from a first-person perspective, rather than by a narrator as in Whitehead’s book.
“This film is about something horrific that happened to children in this country, and it was allowed because of an agreement on silence about it,” she says, praising the director for finding a way to show “the terror that Black people have experienced in a way that makes that pain communicable. And because it makes it communicable, that means it makes it communal, and we all feel it. And that is what makes this film singular and rare.”
Ellis-Taylor has two more passion projects in her sights. She’s writing one about pioneering singer Rosetta Tharpe, often called the “godmother of rock ’n’ roll” for her influence on singers including Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley. The other is a feature-length biopic about another pioneering Black woman, civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer. Says Ellis-Taylor: “I believe that women need to see a woman like Fannie Lou Hamer, someone who actually carried her own power and was not in any way subservient.”
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