A Candid Talk With Nickel Boys’ Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor

In my four years at Vanity Fair, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor has been a refreshing fixture on the awards circuit. Her first go-round was for King Richard, the Will Smith–led biopic for which Ellis-Taylor received raves as Venus and Serena Williams’s determined mother, Oracene. (She received an Oscar nomination for her performance.) Last year, she made the rounds for Origin, Ava DuVernay’s ambitious, globe-trotting exploration of caste systems around the world, which centered Ellis-Taylor in a rare, meaty lead role. Speaking to her during both campaigns, I found her to be unusually candid about her place in the industry, her hesitations around campaigning, and the kind of work she hopes to do.

Enter Nickel Boys, in which Ellis-Taylor gives one of her most devastating and humane performances to date as the grandmother of a boy sent off to an abusive reform school in Jim Crow–era Florida. The film is shot near-entirely in first-person POV, with Ellis-Taylor acting direct to camera, a process she found frustrating—if fitting for her character’s increasing desperation to bring her grandson home. As Ellis-Taylor navigates the rules of the film, she turns in one of the most exciting, energized, and heartbreaking performances of the year.  To the outside eye, Ellis-Taylor has been on a roll of late: She was also a blast in Lee Daniels’s The Deliverance and helped anchor the debut feature Exhibiting Forgiveness this year. But over our refreshingly honest conversation on this week’s Little Gold Men, the Oscar nominee reveals that the offers haven’t exactly been pouring in. She’s still fighting to do great work. “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,” she says. “I wish that I had someone throwing money at me to make those things.”

A Candid Talk With Nickel Boys’ Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor

Following her Oscar nod for King Richard and celebrated lead turn in Origin,Ellis-Taylor is back in the awards race for Nickel Boys—and ready for the tough conversations that come with it.

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