‘Nickel Boys’ Actress Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor Shares Her Ancestral Pain In RaMell Ross’s Dark Story From Florida’s History
deadline.comAunjanue Ellis-Taylor was raised in McComb, Mississippi, a one-time battleground in the struggle for civil rights, and says she carried a lot of the pain her maternal forebears endured.
Undoubtedly, that informed her powerful performance as Hattie in Nickel Boys, writer-director RaMell Ross’s adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s book.
When Hattie’s grandson, Elwood Curtis, is unjustly charged with car theft, he’s sent to the Nickel Academy, a brutal reform school based on the real-life Dozier School in Florida where, in 2013, skeletons of Black boys were discovered in unmarked graves.
Here, Ellis-Taylor describes working with Ross and his poetic, up-close point of view. DEADLINE: You are on your knees when we first see you in Nickel Boys and we know, like your soul, that they’re wounded.
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