In ‘King Richard,’ Aunjanue Ellis Makes a Case for the Williams Sisters’ Heroic Mother
thewrap.comThis story about Aunjanue Ellis first appeared in the Awards Preview issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine.Late in 2020, Aunjanue Ellis shot her final scene in “King Richard,” the biopic that chronicles young Venus and Serena Williams’ rise to tennis superstardom.
It was the last day of a production that, thanks to the pandemic lockdown of spring 2020, had stretched out for a year. And during that year, Ellis gave everything she had to honor the woman whose story she’d been entrusted with: the sisters’ quiet tiger of a mother, Oracene Price.
She cherished the experience, but it was a long haul. “So by the end of it, girl, I was just tired,” Ellis said, laughing. “And I drove off from set with my costume on.
They had to call me and be, like, ‘Listen, you gotta come back. Those are not your clothes!'” At that moment, the actress said, she hadn’t yet absorbed what the movie might mean to people. “There was no sentimentality, like, ‘What did I just [accomplish]?’ I was just ready to go.
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