“King Richard” was a game changer for actress Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor.
It brought her an Oscar nomination for playing the mother of Serena and Venus Williams and opened her up to more directors, more roles, more ideas.
“I’ve been fortunate in the last five to seven years that these kinds of directors reached out to me … or invited me into their filmmaking worlds,” she says. “It’s been a convergence – a fortunate convergence.”
Before “King Richard,” Ellis-Taylor appeared in dozens of films, even more television series. Even though she was nominated for two Emmys (for “When they See Us” and “Lovecraft Country”), “I’m not used to anybody even paying attention to anything I do, let alone being in things where people go see it,” she says.
Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor confers with director RaMell Ross on the set of their film "Nickel Boys."
Now, however, Ellis-Taylor has six films in various forms of completion – including “Nickel Boys,” which is being touted as an Oscar contender. In it, she plays the grandmother of a young boy sent to an abusive reform school.
The first fiction film from Oscar nominee RaMell Ross, it employs a different technique to tell its story. Instead of showing actors talking to each other, it uses the camera as the scene partner. Like a documentary, it pulls the audience into the story in a different way.
Ellis-Taylor had no idea Ross was going to tinker with traditional storytelling.
“We read the script, but I didn’t understand how he was going to do it until I got to work the first day.”
Based on his work with the Oscar-nominated documentary, “Hale County This Morning, This Evening,” Ellis-Taylor knew Ross would bring an interesting take to the project. “I felt someone saw my reality in a very interested and concerned and beautiful way. I knew that he would do something like that in his narrative filmmaking.”
Ross, she says, was on the list of directors she wanted to work with.
Ava DuVernay, Regina Taylor, Tate Taylor, Barry Jenkins and Lee Daniels are among those who have already had Ellis-Taylor on their rosters.
Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor stars as Hattie in "Nickel Boys."
“King Richard,” which won Will Smith a Best Actor Oscar, gave her the kind of boost few ever get – including nominations for the Oscar, the Golden Globe, the British Academy Award, the Critics’ Choice Award and the National Board of Review honor for Best Supporting Actress.
“Even before I got the (Oscar) nomination, I started getting more calls, so ‘King Richard’ definitely changed my life.”
“Nickel Boys” could affect it even more.
“All of the things that would have otherwise been enemies or hindrances. I had to embrace them and use them,” she says of the process. “You adjust … you just have to because we didn’t have hours in the day to figure it out.”
Shot on a limited budget, “Nickel Boys” tells the story of an African-American boy sent to a segregated reform school called the Nickel Academy (a fictionalized version of the Dozier School for Boys). There students are routinely abused by administrators. Ellis-Taylor’s character comes to the school to see him and she’s pushed away, left without answers.
The story is not an easy one to tell but it is an important one, the actress says.
Thanks to “King Richard,” “I’m now doing this kind of work. I really have been fortunate.”
