Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor is listening to Louis Armstrong singing “Makin’ Whoopee” on her phone as I slide into a booth at a Telluride hotel restaurant.
It’s not a bad way to start a Sunday morning.
She then opens a Spotify playlist and hits the song that started her day, Ella Fitzgerald and Armstrong’s version of “Autumn in New York,” telling me that she and a friend are planning a fall trip to upstate New York and her pal had sent along some songs to get her in the mood.
Ellis-Taylor and I have bumped into each other a few times over the past couple of days — Telluride is a small festival — and on each occasion, she has been dressed immaculately, wearing a different pair of bold, brightly colored glasses. People told her that Telluride was casual, “all sweatpants,” but she wasn’t about to represent her new movie, “Nickel Boys,” in loungewear. “I’m not playing,” she says, laughing, showing off a gold ring with a serpent design.
“I love it because I’m from Mississippi and snakes abound,” she says.
Ellis-Taylor grew up on her grandmother’s farm in Magnolia, Miss., and it was those roots that led her, indirectly, to “Nickel Boys,” RaMell Ross’ adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s acclaimed novel about the friendship between two Black boys at a brutal Florida reform school in the early 1960s. Ellis-Taylor saw Ross’ 2018 Oscar-nominated documentary “Hale County This Morning, This Evening” and was so impressed by its depiction of the lives of Black people in a disenfranchised Alabama community that she tracked down his phone number at Brown University, where he teaches, and left him a message.
“I went to Brown, so I still knew the switchboard number by heart,” she says. “I don’t know if he ever got my message. I’m sure the person that took it was just like, ‘Lady, I don’t know how you think this works, but it doesn’t work like that.’ But I didn’t care. I just wanted to express my admiration for the work he did.”
Which led her, five years later, to her agreeing to the play the pivotal role of a loving, devoted grandmother in “Nickel Boys,” and to this Telluride restaurant where we spoke for an hour.
Why did you respond so strongly to “Hale County” that, as you joked, you’d go and “stalk” the filmmaker?
I’m fascinated by representations of the South. And in a lot of what I have seen, I haven’t felt seen. I’ve often felt insulted by it because oftentimes it’s caricature work.
Do you still identify as a Southern woman?
Oh, absolutely. To my core. That’s why I responded to RaMell’s work because I felt like I was seeing something that was a real reflection of me and people that I knew. People walking out of trailers and mud puddles outside of trailers, and lives lived in and out of trailer parks. And it’s not being done in a way where it’s being made fun of. It’s not a fishbowl. It’s lived in, invested in. I loved it so much.
Had you read “Nickel Boys” before being offered the part?
I was aware of it, but hadn’t read it. But I did not care what the part was. If it was RaMell Ross, I didn’t matter to me. I have directors like that — people like that in general. I just want to be a part of what they’re doing. Ava [DuVernay] is one of those people. Lee Daniels is another. I just dig what they’re doing. I dig how they think beyond the product of work that they put out there.
Did you circle back to the book? Is reading an adaptation’s source material important to you?
Well, I’m going to be honest with you: I started it, but I didn’t finish it. And I did not finish on purpose. Here’s the reason why: With something like [the 2023 DuVernay movie] “Origin,” I had to be fluent in how Miss [Isabel] Wilkerson thought because I was going to have to act that. So her ideas, her scholarship, could not be something that I learned on the day. It had to be something that I lived with.
“Nickel Boys” is a true story, but it is still someone’s retelling. And I didn’t want to feel obligated to what Colson Whitehead wrote, because I have that kind of brain where I’ll be like, “Why aren’t we adhering to this part of the book?” I wanted to go into it being a part of what RaMell was building with my eyes wide open and just telling the story that he was trying to tell. Because the stories are very different.
How would you explain the differences between the book and the movie?
There’s an approach to the story that could beautifully honor the story Colson Whitehead wrote. And it would be great. It would also be sufficient. We all would think, “That’s what I read.” But what RaMell wants to do, it seems to me, is build something out of the actual narrative that makes it bigger than what happened to those boys in Florida. That it didn’t just happen to them, that there is a tradition of those reform schools all around this country. And it’s a history that we have ignored, that we have not really unearthed and it has not been vindicated.
So what RaMell has done — with braiding in this archival footage — is that you see what happens with these boys, but you also see it framed in the context of what is happening in this country and what has continued to happen in this country. That is what makes this film worth it. When you do that kind of storytelling, audiences come out of it feeling complicit. Because we all are. We all are complicit in what happened to those children.
You told me earlier that you hadn’t seen the movie. Do you find it difficult to watch yourself onscreen?
It’s not just that. You don’t have the luxury of having full belief in everything that you do. Sometimes it’s just work and it pays and I take care of people in my life with it. So I welcome it, and thank you, Jesus, for it. But some things you believe in and you want people to believe in it the way you believe in it. So I’m not seeing this because I don’t want to come and bring my own judgment to it. I don’t want to be affected by opinions, including my own, because I think the brilliance and the value of it should live outside of that. And as soon as I watch it, I become a consumer. And I don’t want to do that. I want to be an agent of it.
So, if you’re watching it in the theater at the premiere, you’re bringing you’re own self-critical judgment.
Exactly. It becomes an immediate critique.
And if people walk out in the middle of the movie — as they do at festivals — it probably gets in your head. I talked with people after the premiere who told me they were challenged by the way the film shifts between the points of views of the two boys and the subjective, impressionistic storytelling. They found “Nickel Boys” hard to watch.
I want to say something about that. I’ve had people that have seen it tell me it’s tough. I think that we have been conditioned as moviegoers, particularly in this country, to have an expectation of how we should feel watching a film. I want to be an advocate for cinema that is not palliative. I think a lot of times, people want to come into a space that is saying: We are unearthing a tragedy, a brutality against American children. But somehow they want to leave that space feeling good.
They want to leave feeling uplifted, not feeling unmoored.
Yes. And that’s unfortunate. “Nickel Boys” is about brutality against American children, so we should feel discomfited. We should feel confounded. Why? Because if we can feel that just for a little bit, then we can have some empathy, real empathy, for what they endured for a lifetime.
You know, people ask me — I don’t want to be indulgent here, but I do want to say this — because I often play real characters and some of them suffer. Isabel Wilkerson suffered greatly in what we captured in “Origin.” And I’ve been asked, “What is that like for you to play someone who’s going through that? What is it like for you to absorb that? How do you decompress?” And my response is, “I’m good. It’s a privilege for me to do that.” When I’m playing suffering Isabel Wilkerson, Ava DuVernay at some point is going to say “cut.” Isabel Wilkerson didn’t have that privilege. The children in those reform schools didn’t have that privilege. What RaMell wants to do in the movie is make us feel just a little bit of what was unbearable to those children.
A lot of what we see of your character in “Nickel Boys” comes through in glimpses. What kind of feeling did you want to bring to these scenes?
Hattie loves Elwood and that love for her grandson comes out her pores. There’s a scene where they’re decorating a Christmas tree and there’s a playfulness between them. Women during that period of time, Black folks during that period of time, there was not a lot of joy and delight in children because there was no time for it. So to see this woman enjoy and delight in her grandson, that was my hope.
What kind of relationship did you have with your grandmother, the woman who raised you?
That wasn’t this. My grandmother was like, “You need to be fed, clothed and you need to go to church and I’m going to take care of you within those parameters.” She loved me, but she didn’t smile at me very much. Hattie smiles at Elwood.
Do you still have family in Mississippi?
My sister lives in Hattiesburg with my niece and nephew. And I still live in Mississippi, though I’m spending a lot of time in Georgia now. I have to have a presence in the South. No matter where I go, I will always have to have that. The South suffered from the Great Migration, and what ended up happening is it just became a haven for Confederates in this country. They have branded themselves a thousand different ways. But that’s still what it is. And because of that exodus, we have not been properly able to fight it. So I gotta stay there. America has a problem, as Beyoncé says. But I’m not giving up.
