‘Nickel Boys’ Actress Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor Shares Her Ancestral Pain In RaMell Ross’s Dark Story From Florida’s History

Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor was raised in McComb, Mississippi, a one-time battleground in the struggle for civil rights, and says she carried a lot of the pain her maternal forebears endured. Undoubtedly, that informed her powerful performance as Hattie in Nickel Boys, writer-director RaMell Ross’s adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s book. When Hattie’s grandson, Elwood Curtis, is unjustly charged with car theft, he’s sent to the Nickel Academy, a brutal reform school based on the real-life Dozier School in Florida where, in 2013, skeletons of Black boys were discovered in unmarked graves. Here, Ellis-Taylor describes working with Ross and his poetic, up-close point of view.

DEADLINE: You are on your knees when we first see you in Nickel Boys and we know, like your soul, that they’re wounded. Do you ever heal? I was wondering how you heal after performing the heart wrenching scenes with Ethan Herisse who plays Elwood and Brandon Wilson who plays Turner the fellow inmate at the Nickel Academy who strikes up a friendship with Elwood?

AUNJANUE ELLIS-TAYLOR: (Sighing then smiling) The last few years there have been this concentration of these women who have come into my life through movies (Origin,The Color Purple, The Supremes at Earl’s All-You-Can-Eat) I’ve been doing and a little bit of TV as well (When They See Us, Lovecraft Country), who are at these kind of pivotal moments in their lives. And that kind of work has been required of being on your knees emotionally. And I think for me, honestly, I haven’t had to do the work of post filming healing because I bring so much of that with me, it helps to have a place to take it.

DEADLINE: I know you were raised in McComb, dubbed in the 1960s as the ‘bombing’ capital of the world. In the summer of ’64 there were 14 bombings.

ELLIS-TAYLOR: Yeah, we had all those bombings, and then there were shootings and beatings. There’s a record of it, of all that stuff that pretty much happened, as you said, in that concentrated span of time. A lot of that happened in ’64. My grandfather’s church was bombed, and he was arrested for bombing his own church. 

DEADLINE: Would you say the source of your powerful performance as Hattie in this film is connected to your roots in McComb?

ELLIS-TAYLOR: I think that’s fair to say. I talked about this a little bit to a woman the other day and I said: I think that Black women’s tears on film can be exploited. And so, I’m really conscious of that, and how do I do that in a way that honors this specific woman, that honors Hattie’s pain in particular. I have to be really, really, really conscious of that. But yeah, I carry a lot of the pain that my grandmother had, and my mother had, and my aunts had. And women like that, where no one will ever know about them. But what they did in terms of building communities through their pain, listen, if in some sort of way, I get to that place in the work that I do, it means everything to me. I mean, I think that you get the pain, and you get their strength as well.

DEADLINE: How do you heal after those heart wrenching scenes with Ethan Herisse as Elwood and his close friend Turner (Brandon Wilson)?

ELLIS-TAYLOR: The last few years there have been this concentration of these women who have come into my life through movies (Origin, The Color Purple, The Supremes at Earl’s All-You-Can-Eat) I’ve been doing and a little bit of TV as well (When They See Us, Lovecraft Country), who are at these kind of pivotal moments in their lives. And that kind of work has been required of being on your knees emotionally. And I think for me, honestly, I haven’t had to do the work of post-filming healing because I bring so much of that with me, honestly. It helps to have a place to take it.

DEADLINE: There’s a scene where Hattie visits Elwood and has to tell him the lawyer has run off with all her hard-earned money and because of that, hope is lost. You both cry. RaMell said he gave you no direction for tears. Tell me about that? 

ELLIS-TAYLOR: With that scene, it was weird. RaMell and I talked about what it should be, and we felt that Hattie should maybe come into it that she was even a little mentally at her wits’ end and not really being in control of her emotions, because when I had my costume on it was unbuttoned, she was going to look disheveled, and then we did a take of that, and he looked at me and I agreed. I was like, “No, that’s not it.”

DEADLINE: Because Hattie in that moment had to be together?

ELLIS-TAYLOR: Yeah, yeah. But he had to see it. We both had to see it to say, “No, that’s not right.” It’s controlled emotion. And that makes it more effective. So, I’m doing it, and I was trying to be controlling. And I remember this bird, there was a bird that flew in and I heard the bird. And then as I’m talking to him [Elwood], and I did not want to cry, I then, I don’t know, something happened. I guess the weight of what I was doing hit me. I didn’t plan on that.

DEADLINE: There’s another scene: Hattie goes in her Sunday best to visit Elwood but he isn’t allowed to see her. So you ask Elwood’s friend Turner if you can hug him instead because you have so much love to give. And that boy has never been hugged before.

ELLIS-TAYLOR: We did quite a few takes of that. And the takes had to happen a lot of times because of the [POV] process of doing the film and the way that RaMell did it. It was a lot of technical stuff that had to be achieved outside of the acting work. But as far as that moment, I think there was something desirous in her to touch him. He was a proxy for Elwood. And RaMell was like, “I think you need to do it again.” So, we went through it a few times until he felt that that’s what he was seeing.

DEADLINE: I was fascinated when I read that acting for you at a young age wasn’t the beating passion it was, let’s say, for Maggie Smith who wanted to act from birth.

ELLIS-TAYLOR: Rest In Peace, Maggie. Shout out to Maggie Smith. Come on. I knew there was something creative in me. I knew that I knew there was something strange about me. And so did my family members. Something was going on. Girl, what are you? We all had to be in church plays and school plays. Every child was a thespian in McComb. But I didn’t know where it would rear its head in terms of a profession. I never thought it would. I’m a kid from the back woods of rural southern Mississippi. We were poor, but we were not impoverished. And my grandfather actually owned his own farm. He wasn’t a sharecropper. They ate off of what they grew at our farm. They grew corn, peas; name it, they grew it.

After my grandfather died, my grandmother had to raise me on government assistance. And so to choose a profession that would further challenge my grandmother or anybody in my family to have to support me in any way was irresponsible. You have to choose something that is going to make things less hard for the other people in your life. Acting wasn’t one of them things. It just wasn’t a possibility.

DEADLINE: What could you see from your bedroom window when you were growing up in McComb?

ELLIS-TAYLOR: I had my own room. And then there was another room in our house, it was sort of like my spacecraft. And it was where I kind of knew that I wasn’t like the other children. That creative thing we talked about? Yeah. My grandmother had this rocking chair, and I would set it in this room. And I think of it in the way that probably Virginia Woolf talked about in A Room of One’s Own. It’s about a space of being allowed to create. And that’s what this room was for me. And I had this chair, it would be right in front of the window, and it looked out onto a field, where all that stuff was grown. And there was a fig tree out there. There was a house where my grandmother washed clothes. There was another house that was devoted to smoking meats because my grandmother used to cure her own meats.

DEADLINE: What was the conversation when you first met RaMell?

ELLIS-TAYLOR: That was a cheap date! It came around in a very ordinary, conventional way. My agent was telling me, they’re thinking about doing something and RaMell may do this. And I was just like: “I don’t care what he’s doing. I’m there.” Years before, when I saw his [2013] documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening, I tried to find him. I had been at Brown [university] and I knew he was an associate professor of photography there. I remember that number. I tried to call him. It wasn’t like, “I want to work with you.” I just wanted to tell him how much that movie made me feel. So, this coming around in this way just was wish fulfilment.

DEADLINE: I was about to say that RaMell has found a new way of making movies about the experience of African Americans, when actually, it’s a new way of making movies about people.

ELLIS-TAYLOR: Yes, that’s right.

DEADLINE: Rather than categorize — I mean, I never say that the actors are “playing white people”.

ELLIS-TAYLOR: Because that’s never asked of them, ever. We did the junket for The Supremes at Earl’s All-You-Can-Eat. One of the questions was: “Is this a Black film?” My co-workers were saying, “It’s a universal film blah, blah, blah.” And I was quiet. What I said to them was, “Are y’all going to be mad at me if I’m a dissenting voice here?” And I said, “It doesn’t have to be universal. Why is the demand of Black filmmaking or Black filmmakers for it to be universal?” It is sort of like, “We are making you feel better. It’s universal. All of us can share in that.” But no one is asking of — name one of those guys — “Is this a universal film? Is this a white man’s film?” Nobody asks that. It’s always our work that gets that.

DEADLINE: You worked with Ethan before, right? You portrayed his mother in When They See Us.

ELLIS-TAYLOR: I was his mama. Now I’m his grandmama [laughs]. I told him, “I’m going to be your great-great-great grandmama the next time.”

DEADLINE: So how was working with them and the experience of making the film with RaMell’s specific close camera point-of-view?

ELLIS-TAYLOR: Well first of all, I had to get used to using a camera as a scene partner. When I read it, I didn’t know that… I just thought it was going to be conventional and I just thought they’d left it out of the screenplay. I said to RaMell, “It’s not in the script. When’s the camera going to be on the other person?” He’s like, “It’s not.” The air just got rarified. It was weird. I’ve never done anything like that before, using a lens as a scene partner. It was restraining, you know. I try to be as free as possible, but you had to find a freedom within that constraint. And I love Ethan. I just think he’s so lovely, and Brandon as well. And to not be able to look at him and to feel what I wanted to feel in these scenes, it was challenging. It made me feel more what Hattie was feeling.

DEADLINE: Maybe that’s the thing?

ELLIS-TAYLOR: It was isolating, the process of doing it. I couldn’t lean into the things I usually lean into, lean on and lean into my scene partners. I didn’t have that at all.

DEADLINE: It demands that an audience pay attention and it involves them emotionally and intellectually. It’s extraordinary that this film was made by a studio. You have to salute that.

ELLIS-TAYLOR: They didn’t have a lot of money. So that added to a lot of things that he might’ve tried to do but couldn’t do because of time constraints. When you don’t have a lot of money, you don’t have a lot of time. But I think everybody who has been a part of this is tasked to feel what these folks were feeling. The actors in it, and now the people who are watching it.

I’ve had people say: “Well it’s a tough watch. Where’s the hope in it?” And I’ve had to think about that, and it’s been hard for me to hear people have that reaction and it also kind of hurt me, it was depressing. Then I said, “OK, wait a minute. You should feel that way. That is how you should feel.” First of all, that’s another demand of Black filmmaking — that it has to offer hope. 

DEADLINE: No one demands that of Chekhov, do they?

ELLIS-TAYLOR: Nobody. Exactly. But somehow with Black folks, when we tell things, tell the truth, we have to offer hope as well. It’s another kind of labor. I don’t want to chastise anybody, but I think that we have become accustomed to coming into a story like Nickel Boys and feeling like, OK, the movie will tie it up in a bow and it will all be fine. Now I know about this moment in American history, and I can go about my day. But this is not that. People have to understand this: RaMell did this with intention. He did it on purpose for you to feel what you are feeling, for you to feel discomforted. You are supposed to feel that way and I think it does something. I hope people will be open to that feeling, because that discomfort should make you feel you want to do something about it.