Nickel Boys star Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor: 'Black women's tears are exploited'

In under 12 months, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor has appeared in five films – The Color Purple, Origin, The Supremes at Earl’s All-You-Can-Eat, The Deliverance and now Nickel Boys – all directed by Black filmmakers. 

“Is there an intentionality in that? Yeah, there is, but not just because they’re Black directors. They’re also really dope, and doing things that I think are really singular,” she says.

Since making her professional acting debut in The Tempest on Broadway in 1995, as Ariel opposite Patrick Stewart’s Prospero, Ellis-Taylor has built a career across stage, film and TV. Her face became familiar through supporting roles in Hollywood films but the kinds of jobs she was offered changed after she played Oracene ‘Brandy’ Price, the mother of the Williams sisters, in King Richard and scored an Oscar nomination.

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“Of course, you take jobs because you need to work,” she says. “But in terms of when I can choose, and what chooses me – man, I couldn’t be more fortunate.”

In a busy year for Ellis-Taylor, Nickel Boys is the clear standout. Adapted from the Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Colson Whitehead, the film depicts life for two Black teenage boys in a Jim Crow-era segregated reformatory school, based on real accounts of abuse and violence at the notorious Dozier School in Florida. Ellis-Taylor plays Hattie, whose grandson Elwood (Ethan Herisse) is unjustly sent to Nickel Academy.

Director RaMell Ross and cinematographer Jomo Fray shot the drama from first-person perspectives – everything we see of Nickel Academy is through the eyes of newcomer Elwood and long-term resident Turner (Brandon Wilson).

It’s an emotional story. “I get asked to go to those places a lot, in the roles that I played recently at least,” Ellis-Taylor says. “I try to be aware of that, because I think you can exploit Black women’s tears. So I try to look at it like, OK, this is what is demanded of the scene. What is different about this woman’s pain? How do I honour the specifics of it?

“I think because [Nickel Boys] was so weird and strange, and I was reaching for something that I couldn’t touch – I think that’s what did a lot of the work for me.”

The audience doesn’t get to access Hattie’s point of view, so unlike her co-stars, Ellis-Taylor is always acting to the camera.

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“I have never gotten used to cameras, ever,” she says. “I came to the conclusion a couple of weeks ago: actors do their job in the most hostile circumstances possible. They’re asked to meet a moment of believability in the most artificial circumstances. You’re essentially working on a construction site. [The camera] is an enemy to the work I want to do, and it has to be my friend. But I leaned into how isolated it made me feel.”

We learn a lot about Hattie from the way Elwood and Turner look at her. In a key scene just before Elwood is sent to Nickel, Hattie sits at the kitchen table putting the final touches on a cake, visibly distressed by the injustices she’s been forced to swallow over the years; wiping the icing from her knife becomes an intense but therapeutic act.

“I remember having this sort of anger coursing through me. I don’t even remember the words, but I do remember how I felt doing it,” Ellis-Taylor recalls. 

As the camera (representing her grandson) slowly creeps into the space with her, she becomes aware of being watched, and the feelings of intrusion and intimacy suggested by the camerawork are suddenly shared by the characters. The scene is carefully composed but still feels natural and instinctual.

“We approached it in a way that was going to be a lot messier, and by the time we did it, it was very simplified,” Ellis-Taylor says.

Not that she has seen the film. She doesn’t watch any of her work.

“I’m going to look at it and just think it’s bad, period,” she explains.

“I had a great time doing Nickel Boys so I don’t want to look at it and be like, ‘Oh, that’s when I sucked.’”

Hattie is a fictional character, but she is also real: a representation of countless real women, mothers, and maternal surrogates who were rendered helpless and immobile by racist systems. In King Richard and Origin, Ellis-Taylor played real people, but they still had to “become characters” in the same way that Hattie did.

“Often I feel like my work is corrective work. Because women like Oracene Price in King Richard, people don’t know her.

“They assume things about her. They assume that she was an observer of her children’s success, when, in fact, she was instrumental in it.

“So when I found that out, I just felt foolish and knew that my work was going to be correcting the Wikipedia page. Those kinds of people, women like Hattie, are in my mind all of the time.

“Because they’re ignored voices, ignored lives. And it just gives me an opportunity to correct that.”

Nickel Boys is in cinemas now.

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