‘Nickel Boys’ Actress Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor Shares Her Ancestral Pain In RaMell Ross’s Dark Story From Florida’s History
Aunjanue 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.