Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor Wishes She “Had the Volume of Choices That My White Women Contemporaries Have”

Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor never shies away from the tough conversations. This quality has proven especially valuable when it comes to Nickel Boys, widely acclaimed by critics as one of the year’s best films—but also one that’s been labeled “difficult” as it continues traveling the awards circuit. “With a lot of films that we have in American cinema, particularly, the film does the work for us,” Ellis-Taylor says on this week’s Little Gold Men (read or listen below). “The film provides the resolution, the film provides the hope for us. But Nickel Boys is asking something else—and that’s uncomfortable.”

“stalking” RaMell Ross. What about him and his documentary, Hale County This Morning, This Evening, struck you back then?

Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor: Those first few moments, it’s also shot in POV. It’s a car driving really fast down a highway in Alabama, and you feel like you’re in the middle of a video game. But it’s also trees, and it’s houses, and it’s real. I knew immediately that I was in for a two-hour experience that I had not experienced up until this point. I believe in cinema. Seeing the way that he captured the lives of that community in Alabama—I see a lot of photography and film, even writing, about Black Southern life, and I very rarely feel that I’m reflected in it, or truly witnessed by it. I never feel like I’m seeing the work of kindred. But when I saw Hale County, I said, “That’s my people. That’s my people.” It was a kind of intimacy in his work, and he carried that through with Nickel Boys.

What was he like as a director?

He’s one of these directors where you don’t feel like you’re being directed. I had one scene in particular where he was really trying to get something specific. I was struggling with it. We did a lot of takes that day. But he’s a lovely human being—I’m sure you’ve picked that up from being around him—and he’s a big-hearted director. He has an openness, a generosity, and he’s also a freaking genius. That’s a great combination in a director. He has that brain, but it’s not cold. I’ve had that experience where someone is artistically driven in every way, and you could be there or not be there.

In Nickel Boys, you appear mostly in short scenes that are very emotionally intense. What was that experience like, having to summon so much so quickly?

I’m tremendously affected by what happened to these boys. I don’t want anybody to lose sight of the fact that this film was made because of a book that was based on the actual story of these children at the Dozier School, who were brutalized and sexually assaulted. It happened in our backyard, in Mariana, Florida. So that’s all I need, honestly. That kind of work was already done.

How does that apply to Ross’s filmmaking style? You’re clearly feeling the material, but you also have to look direct to camera.

I hate cameras. I say that with pride. It always makes me feel like I’m doing something that’s artificial and fake. I’m pretending to have an experience, and I feel like I’m pretending because this big-ass machine is two feet away from me.

I had to take the thing that I feel is intrusive, and is not a friend to the work that I do, and then I had to act to it. That’s bad karma for me. [Laughs] I was like, “All these years I’ve cursed you out. Now I got to make you my friend.” I think it worked for Hattie, though, because she was alone. She was separated from her grandson, living in a state of remove. That camera being the proxy for my grandson felt terrible. It didn’t feel good, but she didn’t feel good. It aligned with what we hopefully were trying to make happen.

Until recently, you were not often the lead, or even given many meaty supporting parts. Given how much you dislike cameras and all that noise, as you say, was it difficult to feel excited as an actor on set?

For me, it’s impossible to feel that way. A lot of actors do this, but that’s why music is so crucial. You’re fighting—you are in combat against the structures of producing a film, the activity of making a movie. It is antithetical to it. It is an enemy of your work. But they have to do what they have to do. They’ve got to get the sound, they’ve got to put the lights up, they’ve got to build a world. But it’s loud. It’s loud! And it is utterly disinterested in what you’re trying to do. It has no concern. It’s just impossible. So what I do a lot of times is I carry a speaker with me. I worked with a director recently [who] didn’t like it very much. She probably thought it was obnoxious and disrespectful. But what she doesn’t realize is, my work has to matter in this space. It’s my way of reclaiming the space for the work that I have to do.

For someone who has only been a number-one more recently on a film like Origin, or is working with younger stars mostly in Nickel Boys, have you learned how to set a tone on set along those lines?

The best you can do is just be a good example. If you want people to show up on time, you show up on time. You want folks around you to know their lines or whatever? You know your lines. If you want people to be respectful, not just people who think they can get something, then you show that it’s important to be nice to everybody. I’ve worked with actors who believe that if you’re number one on the call sheet, that means people have to be of service to you. I see it the other way around. I see it as: The higher you are up on the call sheet, the more you are in service to the people that you work with.

After the film premiered at Telluride, I saw you respond a bit to people calling it “difficult” or “a hard watch” by emphasizing the movie’s impact and point of view.

I heard that over the summer before any screenings or anything like that.

Oh really?

Yeah. I heard it from people in my world who had seen it early. That was hard to hear. It bummed me out. I was sad—very, very sad. I had to first of all remind myself of why I did the film in the first place. Then, going to Telluride, one of the people said to me, “When I saw it, I thought, where is the hope?” Nickel Boys is saying that the work of hope comes from you. You’re the hope. RaMell shot this film in a way that made the pain of these children communicable. It’s something that’s shared from person to person to us. It becomes all of our pain, and we should all feel that way. Why should we have that expectation, after witnessing something so brutal that happened to children—why do we think we should feel good? Shouldn’t we feel a little bit of what these children and their families felt?

What I mean by hope is, we talk about it. We find out more about what happened to those children. We find out that, “Okay, that didn’t just happen at the Dozier School, it happened at other reform schools all around the country.” We are being really generous in calling them schools—and around the world. It’s similar to what would happen with Catholic girls who would get pregnant, and they would send them off to hide them, and what would happen to them? It is a practice. It is a tradition of how we treat children that we should interrogate.

It’s a movie that makes you think about the story being told as much as how it is being told. Art sometimes requires a level of engagement, and I think this film certainly asks that of its audience in a positive way.

Yeah, exactly that. Someone had an opinion: they were like, “I didn’t get it.” And I was like, “I don’t care if you like it or not.” I know that might sound counterintuitive, but I feel like RaMell shot this with the intention of interrogating not just the story being told, but how the story is told. We have told the story of trauma that happens to those children, and it’s the filming itself that is problematic. The camera is problematic. So what he has done is claim the camera. He calls the camera the technology of racism. I’d call it a tool of oppression. It is something that can be used for that purpose. He’s dismantled that. I think that’s worthy filmmaking that we should embrace and encourage.

I will say, for a lot of people I’ve spoken with, it’s a movie that they haven’t been able to shake. It’s resonating quite strongly. Have you noticed that?

I know, right? I don’t mean to sound trite or dismissive when I say, like, “I don’t care if you like it.” But it’s an intervention in how we receive cinema, especially cinema that is about that subject matter. It takes us out of habits that make us lazy and uninvolved. I swear to God, we can’t afford that. We really, honestly can’t afford that. My friend is an organizer, and he texted me the other day how I was doing. I was like, “…you know.” He said, “You know, Aunjanue, the artists are going to save us.” I said, “How? Tell me how.” He said, “The schools are not going to tell us what we need to know for our own survival as a civilization, as people who are concerned about the world continuing with any sort of measure of humanity. It has to happen in art.” That’s not just coming from my friend’s mouth, but other people too—they’re going to say, “We need to tell more stories about us.” But the volume of the stories is not enough. The telling is not enough. What we have to also explode is how we tell it.

Your last film, Origin, also sparked many conversations—and also got caught up in some controversies around Oscar snubs and distribution struggles. How do you reflect on it now that it’s behind you?

It’s not behind me, you know? Now with Nickel Boys, inevitably, somebody’s going to say something to me about Origin—how they felt watching it and how they were affected by it. Somebody’s always going to be like, “I don’t know what happened with that.” That film was made because of the book that was written by Isabel Wilkerson, and her scholarship, and what she was trying to tell us as a country is necessary for us all to know. She wrote it in response to what she knew was growing in this country. And now we see that she was more than prescient.

When someone says, “I don’t know what happened with that” to you, what do you say back?

A couple people have said that. What happens mostly is: “It was my favorite film of the year!” or “I just loved what Ava did with it.” I kind of go, “Well, where were you? Where’d you go? We needed you. What happened?”

I think in the life of an actor, intention can be a great privilege. I wonder how you’re experiencing that right now, coming off of an Oscar nomination and this string of great projects. Do you feel like you have more choice in what you take on?

It’s important to say that I shot most of what’s coming out now in 2022. Origin and Exhibiting Forgiveness I shot last year, and they came out really quickly, but everything else was shot two years ago, like Nickel Boys. It is just the happenstance of things coming out. I haven’t been doing a whole lot, honestly. I think you’re right—intention is a privilege. After that nomination, there was a flurry of things. I do believe that probably because I say the stuff I do, and talk about the stuff I do, and do the stuff I do, maybe directors think like, “Oh yeah, that’s the chick that needs to play this part.” I think that that probably has something to do with it.

Is that frustrating?

No, not at all. I just don’t want to be bored. I want to feel excited to go to work. I have been working with directors—I hope it continues—who are not interested in the conventional. That makes me excited. They are interested in focusing the lives of Black folks in ways that we haven’t necessarily seen before. That’s exciting to me. That’s all I want to do. More, please.

I saw you recently wrapped a film called Liz Here Now. It’s an independent film. How does a project like that come your way? What does a choice like that look like for you at this stage in your career?

It was directed by Sterling Macer [Jr.], and it’s about a Black woman who works for a white family in Northern California. Once again, some children are in jeopardy, so I become their advocate in a way. That role honestly came around because my manager, Tina Thor, was trying to find something for me—because there was just nothing. I had hesitations about doing it, but I worked with Sterling and told him my hesitations—that it could easily be a regurgitation of something like The Help. What could be done about that? How can we make this woman, or remake this woman, in our imaginations? He was wonderful. How it’s going to turn out, I have no idea, but I actually had a great time making it.

Is there any kind of work you hope you can do more of going forward?

Oh my God, yeah. This is not a moment where I’m just picking fights. [Laughs] But it’s just real. I wish I had the volume of choices that my white women contemporaries have, that Nicole Kidman has, that Kate Winslet has. All the Kates. [Laughs] I wish that I had someone throwing money at me to make those things and believed that telling those stories is viable in a marketplace. But there is that demand. We don’t even enter into the space of demand because we’re told no. I don’t begrudge them of their careers. It’s not just me; I just look at my other amazing Black women actors, and I know what they can do, but it’s not the same.

What keeps you excited as an actor?

My own stuff. Writing. When I’m feeling that, I’m like, “Okay, I need to do some research. I need to get my notebook out.” I will always have that. That can’t be taken away from me. That’s what keeps me going and fighting for that space.

This interview has been edited and condensed.