Behind every great man, as the old, outdated expression goes, there’s a great woman — and there’s a pretty decent chance she’s been played by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor.
The 55-year-old actress has built a long, inspiring career out of portraying characters who linger just off center stage: the long-suffering wife of Cuba Gooding Jr.’s Navy SEAL in 2000’s Men of Honor; Ray Charles’ mistress in Jamie Foxx’s 2004 biopic Ray; Yusef Salaam’s mother in 2019’s When They See Us (her first Emmy nomination); and Venus and Serena Williams’ mom in the 2021 Will Smith film about their dad, King Richard (her first Oscar nom).
“If we only know the figurehead and we don’t know the women who were doing the groundwork, it’s not the full truth,” she tells THR. “We’d be telling a half story.”
She fills in the other half once again in the just-released Nickel Boys, Amazon’s adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s 2019 best-seller in which Ellis-Taylor plays the grandmother of a Black teen (Ethan Herisse) who, in the 1960s, endures endless abuse at a segregated reform school in Florida. “I feel like stories like this are a bit of corrective justice,” she says of the film. “It’s another example of how this kind of brutality happened in this land and we have been willfully unaware of it.”
Ellis-Taylor’s own education was considerably less harrowing: She was born in San Francisco but raised on her grandmother’s farm in Mississippi. After spending time at Tougaloo, an HBCU near Jackson, she transferred to Brown, where a professor encouraged her to pursue theater. She decided to major in African American studies instead. “I was at this [Ivy League] institution — I didn’t want to take acting classes,” she explains with a laugh.
She eventually did end up studying theater — at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Her first break came opposite Patrick Stewart in a 1995 Broadway production of The Tempest. In what was a harbinger of supporting roles to come, she played Prospero’s sprite, Ariel, the ultimate sidekick. A year later, she made her film debut in Girls Town, a drama about three high school friends. Then, for the next three decades, she pretty much never stopped working, churning out two or three movies a year, with modest but notable roles in everything from I Love You Phillip Morris to The Taking of Pelham 123 (both in 2009) to The Resident and The Help (2011) to Ava DuVernay’s Origin and Oprah Winfrey’s The Color Purple (2023).
This past year, along with Nickel Boys, she’s also appeared in Lee Daniels’ haunted house thriller The Deliverance. She’ll be back for more in 2025, with Liz Here Now, about the rise of the Black Panther Party, and Lucky Strike, a World War II drama in which she’ll once again be the woman pushing men to greatness (in this case, a couple of actors with familiar names, Scott Eastwood and Colin Hanks).
“I feel like what I am supposed to do is be in constant research of my life here in this country,” Ellis-Taylor says. “The lives of my mother, my grandmother, my family. I am always seeking to understand the experience of my ancestors.”
This story appeared in the Jan. 9 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
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