Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor spent nearly twenty-five years being the steadiest person in other people's films, and since 2019 the films have started to notice. She is at her best when the writing gives her a room, a silence and someone who will not answer.
Fi1m perspective
Early in Nickel Boys (2024), a grandmother crosses a room towards a boy for a hug. Jomo Fray keeps the camera at the boy's eye level, so the shoulder of Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor's dress fills the screen and then everything goes dark. We were caught off guard by how much that undid us, and on reflection it is her doing as much as the camera's: she comes on without hurry, and when the picture goes black we feel held rather than blinded. Later she has one long scene talking to a boy who will not answer, and it is the best acting in the film. She is good at waiting for a reply.
That patience took a long time to be noticed. She began on Broadway in 1995, as Ariel opposite Patrick Stewart in The Tempest, and then spent more than two decades in supporting parts: Ray (2004), Yule Mae Davis in The Help (2011), recurring television in The Mentalist and True Blood. The turn came in 2019 with When They See Us for Ava DuVernay, who has now directed her twice, and from there the parts got larger: Hippolyta Freeman in Lovecraft Country (2020), Oracene Price in King Richard (2021), and a first proper lead as Isabel Wilkerson in Origin (2023), the second of the DuVernay films. She has said, "Most of the work that I've done, I haven't been the lead, and that's never mattered. It's always been the character." We believe her, and we also think the leads should have come sooner.
What she does in a scene is decline to perform the feeling the writing is angling for. Hippolyta is George's wife and for a long time little more; then, late on, the series hands her a stretch of her own and she moved us more than the plot around it deserved, because she plays a woman finding out what she wants rather than a woman being told. Nickel Boys gives her the same thing at feature length, in a film that is exact, tender and a little in love with its own method. The risk is obvious. She has become the reliable mother and grandmother, the person who steadies a film, and directors may keep asking for that until it hardens into a manner.
Lucky (2026) shows the cost of the other kind of part. She plays Agent Billie Rand as tired, patient and unimpressed, the one person on screen who behaves like an adult with a job, and the series, having cast her, gives her nothing to do with any of it except chase Anya Taylor-Joy from town to town. Seven episodes of that is a waste of someone who is best when a scene stops moving. See Nickel Boys first. Then hope the next script has the sense to sit her down opposite somebody and let her wait.
Biography
Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor is an American actress. She was born on 21 February 1969 in San Francisco, California, and raised in Mississippi. She studied at Tougaloo College, Brown University and New York University before beginning her professional career on stage.
Her film roles include Jo in Men of Honor (2000), Mary Ann Fisher in Ray (2004), Therese Garber in The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 (2009), Yule Mae Davis in The Help (2011), Oracene Price in King Richard (2021) and Hattie in Nickel Boys (2024). She received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress for King Richard.
On television she has appeared in True Blood (2008), The Mentalist (2010–2013), When They See Us (2019) and Lovecraft Country (2021). She was nominated for two Primetime Emmy Awards for the latter two. She played Agent Billie Rand in the 2026 miniseries Lucky.
