Oscar-nominated actress Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor considers Mississippi her home, and her latest theatrical release is one that touches on topics familiar to the state. “Nickel Boys” takes on systemic racism, social justice and family trauma.
She plays Hattie in the movie, which is based on a Pulitzer-Prize winning novel with the same name. The grandmother works to free her grandson, Elwood (played by Ethan Herisse), after he’s falsely accused of stealing a car.
After he’s shipped to a reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida, he meets Turner (played by Brandon Wilson), who becomes his best friend. The story follows love and optimism that life can improve in an environment steeped in racism and blatant corruption.
Ellis-Taylor, who attended Jackson’s Tougaloo College, has many film and television credits, including “The Help,” “The Color Purple,” “Origin,” and “Lovecraft Country.”
She’s also won and been nominated for numerous awards for her work. Her acting in “King Richard” opposite Will Smith earned her an Oscar nomination for best actress in a supporting role. Ellis-Taylor’s work on “Nickel Boys” is up for a best supporting actress Critics Choice Award.
The McComb native is also known for her activism. Ellis-Taylor was recently honored with the Social Impact Award for her ongoing social justice advocacy as part of the Critics Choice 7th Annual Celebration of Black Cinema and Television. The event will stream on Starz in January.
Oscar nomination: Tougaloo College alumna Aunjanue Ellis gets best supporting actress nod for 94th annual Oscars
She is the founder and CEO of Miss Myrtis films, named for her grandmother. She funded several projects including a billboard as part of Take It Down America, a push to get Mississippi to remove the Confederate flag from its state flag. Mississippi adopted its new flag with a magnolia and the phrase “In God We Trust” in 2021.
Ellis-Taylor, in an interview with The Clarion-Ledger, described the importance of telling the story of “Nickel Boys,” and how fresh perspective can help the audience connect with this moment in living history and what’s next for her professionally and in her social justice work.
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Actor Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor and director RaMell Ross on the set of their film “Nickel Boys,” from Orion Pictures. L. Kasimu Harris
‘Nickel Boys’ brings perspective to story of Jim Crow racism
The film was important to Ellis-Taylor because she wanted to work with RaMell Ross after seeing his documentary “Hale County This Morning, This Evening.” The Oscar-nominated documentary follows residents in the U.S. Black Belt and tells their stories in a way rarely seen.
Ellis-Taylor described the work as something that affirmed her and the lives of people she cares about.
She said it was a project about the rural South that didn’t feel insulting or like a diminishing of our lives. She said people can look at the South and judge or have a disrespectful idea of the culture. But his work was something different, she said. Ross moved to Alabama to be closer to and better understand the subjects of his film.
Ross and cinematographer Jomo Fray came to “the movie “Nickel Boys” with a vision of what it would look like, including filming it from the characters’ point of view.
Ellis-Taylor said POV recording was strange, and “I didn’t get the full measure of what that would mean” going into filming.
The first day on set was really the first time she realized she’d be acting to the camera the whole time. While costars would be nearby saying the lines, they weren’t directly behind the camera. Acting without a scene partner and talking to the lens was like working in a vacuum.
Still, Ellis-Taylor poured love into her scenes with Herisse and Wilson.
In one, just before Elwood gets sent away, Hattie talks to him about how the family has been hurt before through false accusations and how the violence has affected her and them. She tells the story, mostly without looking directly at her grandson while she cuts a cake and serves it on plates. Instead of crying, she’s steely and contained when others might, justifiably, wail.
Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor stars as Hattie in director RaMell Ross’s “Nickel Boys,” from Orion Pictures. Courtesy of Orion Pictures
That scene, in part, was hard because it was shot in a new way, Ellis-Taylor said. The camera was removed, not in front of her. Ross and Fray described the camera angles, movement as though Elwood is tiptoeing toward her in an interview with Vanity Fair. She was concerned that her emotions wouldn’t translate to the audience, and she wanted them to feel what she did.
It’s the first time, she said, that you got to feel Hattie’s rage about everything that’s been taken from her. The rest of the time, she has to do her best to hold it all together.
Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor stars as Hattie in director RaMell Ross’s “Nickel Boys,” from Orion Pictures. Courtesy of Orion Pictures
‘Present moment’ is shared experience for communities
Even in intimate shots, there can be a lot to process. Ross and Fray approached the film with the idea you don’t just see one thing, Ellis-Taylor said, you see all the things that surround it in tandem. And it’s part of the story.
A small detail in a scene shows a college brochure held by a magnet sliding down the fridge while she talks on the phone.
“This is that child’s future falling away,” Ellis-Taylor said.
She is sure to always call them children. It is necessary, she said, to bring stories of schools like this to light and keep people from ever treating kids with such brutality in the future.
Stories like “Nickel Boys” are living history.
“This is a present moment, not part of our past,” Ellis-Taylor said.
Almost everyone has a cousin or knows someone who went to reform school, but we don’t think about what happens to those children in those facilities, Ellis-Taylor said. It’s not an isolated circumstance. It’s a shared experience.
And there are living adults processing what happened at the real facility that “Nickel Boys” is based on.
Horrors uncovered at the Florida School for Boys, also known as the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, happened to real people. Almost 100 bodies were exhumed from the campus, as of 2016. Inmates were subjected to including rapes, beatings and violence that lead to the deaths of many boys aged 6 to 18 between 1900 and 1973.
The facility finally closed in 2011.
Earlier this year, the state set up a $20 million fund to benefit men from Dozier and the Okeechobee School, which took overflow from Dozier. The deadline to apply for the funds is Dec. 31, 2024.
The community surrounding the school profited off the labor of those kids for years, Ellis-Taylor said.
“Nickel Boys,” she said, puts the moviegoers front and center in the action and what the characters feels and does not absolve them. Instead, they’re participants.
“We feel being targets. We feel the pain they feel,” she said.
She wants the Mississippi audience to see it. The movie is in limited release and will be in theaters nationwide in January.
After, she hopes they talk about it and know this was allowed on our soil. Ellis-Taylor compared the reform schools to WWII concentration camps. People knew it was happening. Neighbors knew and didn’t do anything.
Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor stars as Hattie and Ethan Herisse as Elwood in director RaMell Ross’s “Nickel Boys,” from Orion Pictures. Courtesy of Orion Pictures
Children were sent to the schools to work, and Black kids were disproportionately harmed by violence there. A January 2016 report on the facility showed that the majority of the inmates were African-American. More Black students died, and they were more likely to be buried in unmarked graves or be unnamed in records.
According to the NAACP, Black people are put in jail at five times the rate of whites. While Black kids make up 14% of the population, they represent 32% of children who are arrested, 42% of kids who get detained and 52% of those whose cases are waived to criminal court.
Ellis-Taylor referenced a 2015 video of a Texas case police office slammed a girl in a bikini into the ground. (The officer resigned and a lawsuit was later settled.)
“Just being Black in America is a crime,” Ellis-Taylor said, noting Black people are unduly targeted and prosecuted for crimes their white counterparts wouldn’t be, like playing music too loud. “What are you guilty of?”
What’s the next battle in social justice?
Recent political development, she said, have shown where work is still needed, even in places people though battles were won.
Everything that we’d assumed of where we are and advancements that we thought we’d made, we’ve been corrected, Ellis-Taylor said. Progress on women’s rights and caste that were considered finished work have not happened, she said. It’s important to be ever vigilant.
It’s a struggle amid “concerted efforts to keep us ignorant,” she said, including recent efforts in Mississippi to remove Civil Rights Movement leader Fannie Lou Hamer from school curriculums.
Mississippi history A look at Fanny Lou Hamer
What’s next professionally?
Ellis-Taylor thinks one of the best ways to counteract the attempts to throw history and issues into darkness is cinema. It’s “still wild” and can’t be controlled.
No project, she said, is off limits.
But Ellis-Taylor is bored with projects where the female characters aren’t fully developed and turned down a recent project where the men had complexity, revelation and fullness. The women, however, seemed incomplete.
“Male writers, specifically, can and should do better, she said.
Her dream project, which she’s been working on for years, is about Hamer. She’s working to do it herself and is finding the right partners to bring it to life.
This article originally appeared on Mississippi Clarion Ledger: Actress, MS native says ‘Nickel Boys’ isn’t just part of our past
