Behind each nice man, because the previous, outdated expression goes, there’s an ideal lady — and there’s a fairly respectable likelihood she’s been performed by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor.
The 55-year-old actress has constructed an extended, inspiring profession out of portraying characters who linger simply off heart stage: the long-suffering spouse of Cuba Gooding Jr.’s Navy SEAL in 2000’s Males of Honor; Ray Charles’ mistress in Jamie Foxx’s 2004 biopic Ray; Yusef Salaam’s mom in 2019’s When They See Us (her first Emmy nomination); and Venus and Serena Williams’ mother within the 2021 Will Smith movie about their dad, King Richard (her first Oscar nom).
“If we solely know the figurehead and we don’t know the ladies who had been doing the groundwork, it’s not the total reality,” she tells THR. “We’d be telling a half story.”
She fills within the different half as soon as once more within the just-released Nickel Boys, Amazon’s adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s 2019 best-seller by which Ellis-Taylor performs the grandmother of a Black teen (Ethan Herisse) who, within the Nineteen Sixties, endures infinite abuse at a segregated reform college in Florida. “I really feel like tales like this are a little bit of corrective justice,” she says of the movie. “It’s one other instance of how this type of brutality occurred on this land and we’ve got been willfully unaware of it.”
Ellis-Taylor’s personal schooling was significantly much less harrowing: She was born in San Francisco however raised on her grandmother’s farm in Mississippi. After spending time at Tougaloo, an HBCU close to Jackson, she transferred to Brown, the place a professor inspired her to pursue theater. She determined to main in African American research as a substitute. “I used to be at this [Ivy League] establishment — I didn’t wish to take performing lessons,” she explains with fun.
She ultimately did find yourself finding out theater — at New York College’s Tisch Faculty of the Arts. Her first break got here reverse Patrick Stewart in a 1995 Broadway manufacturing of The Tempest. In what was a harbinger of supporting roles to come back, she performed Prospero’s sprite, Ariel, the last word sidekick. A yr later, she made her movie debut in Ladies City, a drama about three highschool associates. Then, for the subsequent three many years, she just about by no means stopped working, churning out two or three motion pictures a yr, with modest however notable roles in all the pieces from I Love You Phillip Morris to The Taking of Pelham 123 (each in 2009) to The Resident and The Assist (2011) to Ava DuVernay’s Origin and Oprah Winfrey’s The Coloration Purple (2023).
This previous yr, together with Nickel Boys, she’s additionally appeared in Lee Daniels’ haunted home thriller The Deliverance. She’ll be again for extra in 2025, with Liz Right here Now, in regards to the rise of the Black Panther Celebration, and Fortunate Strike, a World Battle II drama by which she’ll as soon as once more be the lady pushing males to greatness (on this case, a few actors with acquainted names, Scott Eastwood and Colin Hanks).
“I really feel like what I’m presupposed to do is be in fixed analysis of my life right here on this nation,” Ellis-Taylor says. “The lives of my mom, my grandmother, my household. I’m all the time searching for to know the expertise of my ancestors.”
Ellis-Taylor because the matriarch in Amazon/MGM’s Nickel Boys.
Courtesy of Orion Footage/Amazon
This story appeared within the Jan. 9 difficulty of The Hollywood Reporter journal. Click on right here to subscribe.