Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor Is Teaching the Next Generation to Stop Apologizing (Exclusive)

Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor is mother. 

According to Merriam-Webster, a “mother” is defined as “a female parent” while the verb form, “to mother,” means “to give birth to.” In 2024, however, hopefully we’re beginning to move past such stiff expressions of the word. Biology is of little importance when it comes to imparting love, caring for others and teaching them how to live. Especially within the queer sense of chosen family, a mother may be a step-mother, a grandmother, a godmother, a drag mother or even just a mentor or friend (gender irrelevant). Of course there’s also Urban Dictionary‘s definition of “mother,” a term reserved for a person “who’s iconic and constantly serving.” That most certainly applies to Ellis-Taylor.

In her latest role, that of Hattie in Nickel Boys, the adaptation of Colson Whitehead‘s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Nickel Boys, Ellis-Taylor proves that mothering is an act of love separated from genetics. The film, directed by RaMell Ross, focuses on Hattie’s grandson Elwood Curtis (Ethan Herisse) who is falsely convicted of stealing a car in Jim Crow-era Florida and shipped to an abusive reform school. While laboring at the Nickel Academy, Elwood meets Turner (Brandon Wilson), and the pair become fast friends with Hattie caring for both boys from afar. 

While Ellis-Taylor, 55, has been hard at work for nearly 30 years (yes, that was her fighting Denise Richards in Undercover Brother), she’s recently snatched the spotlight with lauded performances in the likes of King Richard, Lovecraft Country and If Beale Street Could Talk. In the midst of the Nickel Boy‘s rollout (it premiered in New York on Dec. 13, but will arrive on Prime Video in the new year), the Oscar nominee sat down with Parade to discuss her work in Nickel Boys, her upbringing in Mississippi and the importance of never apologizing for who you are.

While Nickel Boys may seem like a straightforward literary adaptation on the surface, viewers will clock Ross’s unique vision instantly. Rather than being shot in third-person, the entire story is told through Elwood and Turner’s alternating first-person points-of-view, so the audience only sees what they see. 

For Ellis-Taylor, that meant acting as if the camera was her scene partner rather working off another actor. 

“It’s very, very different,” she said about the difficult process of acting to a camera rather than a scene partner. “You have these really beautiful and lovely actors in Brandon Wilson and Ethan Herisse, but you can’t see them. I wasn’t able to play with them and all the things about them that could evoke emotions. I just hear their voices and am by myself to conjure what I was feeling. So it was frustrating.”

Especially for a private person like Ellis-Taylor, who doesn’t use social media, the task of delivering an honest performance straight to camera was difficult. “I don’t particularly like cameras,” she confessed. “I’ve never gotten used to them, which is not good as someone who does a job that requires a camera. I have always wanted to believe that I’m doing something that is truthful, but then you look, and there’s this big machine that’s saying, ‘You’re not. This is not real.'”

And yet despite the unique filming approach, Ellis-Taylor radiates nothing but  warmth and care in the lyrical epic. In one particularly memorable scene, Hattie arrives at Nickel Academy only to be informed by Turner that she won’t be able to visit Elwood. Hattie then asks Turner if she can give him a hug, for him to pass on to her grandson. Due to the first-person cinematography from Jomo Fray, Ellis-Taylor basically had to believably hug a giant hunk of metal as if it were a living breathing boy.

“That was a tough day,” Ellis-Taylor remembered, regarding filming the hug. “It took a long time, a lot of takes.” 

Due to the lack of a scene partner, Ellis-Taylor had to rely more heavily on her director. “I was almost after every take saying to him, ‘Did I get it? Does this feel okay? Does this feel right?'” she said, describing the process. “In more traditional filmmaking, I don’t need that affirmation because I’m having an experience with someone. You can feel the energy, but in this you can’t. He needed to achieve something that I didn’t have the measure of. It was tough, and I was just like, ‘I’m sorry. I’m not getting it today.'”

Of course, Ellis-Taylor did eventually get the shot, one that’s moved audiences since its Telluride Film Festival premiere in August. Her performance has already been nominated for a Critics’ Choice Award this year, and the film has been amassing accolades including nods from the Independent Spirit Awards, the Gotham Awards and the Golden Globes, among others. 

While Ellis-Taylor only appears in a handful of scenes throughout the film, her nurturing performance lingers well after the closing credits. This is thanks in part to Ross’s screenplay. “I just thought the script was a full thing, like a full animal, an organism,” Ellis-Taylor said. “It had breath. It had body. So I didn’t feel compelled to read the book.”

Perhaps an even greater source of inspiration, however, was Ellis-Taylor’s maternal grandmother, Myrtis Taylor. It was in honor of Myrtis as well as Aunjanue’s mother, Jacqueline Taylor, that the actress added the “Taylor” to her last name. 

“The love of my life, my mother, gave me my Daddy’s name,” she told Variety in 2023. “I was like, wait a minute, lady, I want your name. This past birthday, I said ‘What am I doing? I want to carry her with me every day.'”

In Nickel Boys, Ellis-Taylor used the memory of her own grandmother to inform her portrayal of Elwood’s. 

“My grandmother was not a very affectionate person, and neither really was my mother,” she remembered. “But I knew my grandmother loved me desperately. She was just not expressive, but she would do things that showed how much she cared about me.” 

Ellis-Taylor remembers one instance growing up on Mississippi’s unpaved roads, where her grandmother drove her to church to recite a poem, even though it was storming, and after trying to convince her granddaughter to stay home. “We were driving up the road, got stuck in the mud, and my grandmother got out of the car and pushed the car by herself out of the mud,” she recalled. 

Remembering a conversation she had with her grandmother that impacted her work on Nickel Boys, Ellis-Taylor said, “Because I was a strange, annoying child, I asked my grandmother, ‘Is there anything that you want to change about yourself?’ And she said, ‘I wish I talked more.’ Of course at the time I didn’t get it, but now I’m thinking she’s just very, very shy. I took her lack of affection as just coldness, but she probably wanted to do more than that, and didn’t feel safe in doing that.”

“She never particularly smiled at me,” Ellis-Taylor continued. “She didn’t look at me the way Hattie looks at Elwood. I think this portrayal of Hattie in some way is my honoring the things that my grandmother couldn’t express.”

Now, Ellis-Taylor is expressing both the ferocious strength of her maternal figures and Hattie’s enveloping warmth, in front of and behind those “big machines.” This is her second time caring for Herisse on screen, after the pair played Yusef Salaam and his mother Sharonne in Ava DuVernay‘s Emmy-nominated 2019 series When They See Us, which depicts the wrongful imprisonment and ultimate exoneration of five young boys (including Salaam) after a Central Park jogger was murdered in 1989.

“I think it is a sign that you’re doing something right, if you have the opportunity to work with Aunjanue, not once, but twice,” Herisse told Parade as a part of this story. 

As a teenager on the set of When They See Us, Herisse described himself as a “sponge” around his TV mom. “It was my introduction to really working with a pro who understood the craft,” he said. 

Even from behind the camera on the Nickel Boys set, Herisse was “sucked into” her work. “She just has her own gravity when she’s in scenes,” he said. “You cannot help but be pulled into it.”

In addition to mentoring Herisse as an actor and showing him how to make a graceful exit from a press event (“She will be there for like 30-45 minutes tops,” he revealed.), she also cares for the next generation of actors in Hollywood as people.

“Aunjanue is fun. She’s really funny and a joy to talk to,” Herisse said. “She took the time after wrapping to sit down with me and chat and catch up about what’s been going on over the past few years. We got into a really wonderful conversation. She’s such a sweet soul.”

As with any strong mother, especially in a queer sense, Ellis-Taylor stands firm in her convictions and is vocal about what she believes. In 2022, Ellis-Taylor came out publicly as bisexual although she’d been out to her friends and family for years. Since then she’s been outspoken about her queerness, choosing to ditch gowns in favor of elaborate panted ensembles on the Nickel Boys red carpets. 

“I wanted to do something that honored my queerness,” she told the Associated Press. She wanted “to do something that didn’t live up to the expectation of femininity…I wanted to push against that.” 

She’s even called out her own films for their mishandling of queer stories. When 2023’s The Color Purple, in which she plays Mama, watered down the book’s lesbian plotline, Ellis-Taylor did not baulk at chastising the studio. 

“Alice Walker is a queer woman. She had a long relationship with Tracy Chapman. I think The Color Purple was an expression of her claiming that in her life and in her imagination,” Ellis-Taylor told Parade. “At that time, that is radical. For us to make the decision in 2023 to not fully show or embrace that? We’re closing our eyes. We’re closing our mouths. We aren’t telling the truth.”

“If the outside world is, with intention and dedication, bigoted and homophobic,” she continued, “and we are attempting to tell the fullness of Black womanhood and part of that is being queer, then we should not be half-assed about it. That means we’re scared. We’re apologizing for a woman being a lesbian, a woman being bisexual. Why are we apologizing? If you’re apologizing, you’re essentially saying there’s something wrong with it.” 

Ellis-Taylor is not one to apologize for being herself, for championing those she loves nor for calling out the unjust systems of showbiz. When discussing the possibility of returning to Broadway, she told Parade, “One of the things that would be a requirement for me is that I want to do something that’s an exploration of the fullness of being a woman. I found a lot of times that’s not the case, that you’re doing assistantship work for men. You’re being a steward to the male experience. I’m tired and bored of that.” 

In a recent Vanity Fair interview, Ellis-Taylor also called out the systemic racism of Hollywood when it comes to casting. “I wish I had the volume of choices that my white women contemporaries have,” she said. Her indignation, however, is as much for others as for herself. “It’s not just me,” she continued, “I just look at my other amazing Black women actors, and I know what they can do, but it’s not the same.” 

Last year, Ellis-Taylor’s championing of other Black women led to her passing out postcards advertising her film Origin in a theater parking lot, when the it was woefully under-marketed and failed to find an audience. The film, also directed by DuVernay, tells the life story of Isabel Wilkerson, the Black Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who wrote Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents and delves into the global concepts of racism, discrimination and caste.

Ellis-Taylor is still upset that the film fizzled during awards season. “The desire for [it to receive awards attention] is because it would have placed Origin into the national conversation,” she explained. “Ava wanted to have a real impact on how we discuss caste, knowing that caste impacts decisions that are being made, particularly voting decisions.” 

Perhaps Ellis-Taylor’s “mothering” is most on display in her writing of “A Letter to My Daughters” in 2022. The Variety op-ed was in response to an article on L’Oreal Beauty Blog entitled “How to Make Your Lips Smaller,” which encouraged Black women to make their features fall more in line with American beauty standards. 

“When I read that, I was like, ‘What?’ I looked at the date because it was just like, ‘When was this written?’ It was just ridiculous,” she said recounting the situation. 

While she instantly understood the danger of the message at hand (one that the site later apologized for and removed), she was worried more susceptible readers would not.

“I knew that if someone else read that, they would go, ‘My lips might be too big. If a beauty brand is telling me this, then they must be right,'” she recalled. “So much pressure is put on women to literally be their own plastic surgeons. It is an indication of how much women are still not liked very much in our culture.”

Her letter, however, written to women who have played her on-screen daughters, ends on a note of exuberance and hope. Ellis-Taylor for one does care for women, especially Black women.

“My daughters. I’m not worried. I’m not worried,” it reads. “For I have sat next to you, held your hands, breathed your rarified air, and fainted at your brilliance. Yes, you are magic, but not of the ephemeral ‘rabbit in the hat’ variety. For we are not ephemera, we are bone and flesh and feeling. You are the magic that Alice Walker describes as ‘craft+talent+courage.’ I’m not worried. I’m not worried. For I see constant Dawn in your eyes. The jewels you wear are ‘Ruby’s.’ In your voices, I hear ‘Truth.’ You rage with laughter. My bright, Black future.”

It’s signed, “Your mama on the screen, your aunt on and off screen, your friend for life.” 

One of the women the letter is addressed to is Saniyya Sidney, who plays Venus Williams in King Richard, the film for which Ellis-Taylor received her Oscar nomination. In the movie, Ellis-Taylor plays Oracene Price, the mother of Venus and Serena Williams (Demi Singleton). 

On set, Ellis-Taylor embodied a strong, loving spirit as both Oracene and the caretaker to the five young Black actresses, who played her daughters. 

“She was the mother of the whole entire crew,” Sidney told Parade. “Her stillness and her strength were awe-inspiring to see.” 

In addition to filming TikTok dances (“She would always want us to teach her the routine,” said Sidney.) and practicing tennis with the girls, Ellis-Taylor was there to ensure they didn’t get chewed up and spit out by the industry. 

“She would want us to know that we were powerful, that we were heroes, that we were warriors,” said Sidney. “She would always instill in us, our history of strong Black women.” 

Before a pivotal scene where Oracene adds beads to Venus’s hair before a tennis match, a scene in which Oracene and her daughters discuss abolitionist Sojourner Truth’s seminal Ain’t I a Woman?, Ellis-Taylor wanted to ensure the young actresses knew about the trailblazing feminist icon. 

“Before we even shot the scene, she gave us a whole history lesson on the women that came before us,” Sidney recounted. The fashion-conscious Ellis-Taylor also shared the storied African tradition of weaving beads into braided hair. “[Oracene] is doing her hair the way she is to [teach Venus] to stand her ground and showcase her beauty,” Sidney added. “She finally showed Venus her worth.” 

While Ellis-Taylor has amassed an IMDb page full of mothers, biological or not, perhaps her most profound legacy will be the messages of strength and care she’s imparted to everyone who enters her orbit in person or on screen. And she’s done all this in spite of those pesky cameras. 

“She would take pictures with us even though she didn’t want to take them. I framed one and gave it to her as a wrap gift,” Sidney said recounting her profound respect for Ellis-Taylor. “I’m glad she has that because I can always have the memory of knowing I got to work with one of the greatest.” 

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