Actress and activist Aunjanue Ellis spoke with Kelundra Smith about her expansive work in Hollywood, the women who formed and inspire her life and her on-screen characters, and why she calls Mississippi home.
Story by Kelundra Smith | Photographs by Imani Khayyam
Hippolyta Freeman, a character in Misha Green’s HBO series “Lovecraft Country,” sits with her legs crossed on the floor. She’s tilting the planets on a gold sundial to reveal its mysteries. Suddenly, she’s in and pulls out a key unlocking a portal to a different dimension.
Flash forward and she is on stage dancing with Josephine Baker in Paris donning white feathers on her breasts and diamonds draped around her neck. She wears dark lipstick, smokes cigarettes, and blows kisses at everyone — things she would never do as a respectable wife and mother in 1950s Chicago. After one of their shows, Hippolyta and Josephine share a cigarette.
Hippolyta: Now that I’m tasting it ... freedom like I’ve never known before. I see what I was robbed of back there. All those years, I thought I had everything I ever wanted, only to come here and discover that all I ever was was the exact kind of Negro woman white folks wanted me to be. I feel like they just found a smart way to lynch me without me noticing the noose.
Josephine Baker: Don’t it just make you angry?
Hippolyta: Furious. Sometimes I just … I wanna kill white folks. And it’s not just them. I hate me. I hate me for letting them make me feel small.
A few weeks into “Lovecraft Country's” first season, I caught up with actress Aunjanue Ellis to talk about her Southern heritage, most memorable roles, and activism over a few phone conversations. During our first conversation, she spoke to me from an Airbnb rental in Los Angeles. In our later conversations, she was back at her childhood home in McComb, Mississippi. Although Ellis has been working in the film industry for more than 20 years, she has maintained her residence in the Magnolia State.
Staying close to those humble beginnings is Ellis’ super power as a performer. She taps into the souls of the Hippolyta Freemans of the world — women who want more and deserve more. In her other films, such as “The Help,” “If Beale Street Could Talk,” “Pimp,” and “Of Mind and Music,” she gives audiences an intimate look into the lives of women who society otherwise ignores. She draws inspiration from the Black women in her own life who inspired her to stand up for what is right and dare to create a new world.
Although Aunjanue Ellis has been working in the film industry for more than 20 years, she has maintained her residence in the Magnolia State.
To know actress and storyteller Aunjanue Ellis is to first know her grandparents, the Rev. Ned Taylor and Myrtis Taylor. Rev. Taylor pastored four churches in rural Mississippi, and Mrs. Taylor was the epitome of a fierce and dutiful first lady. Ellis did not have the opportunity to meet the reverend because he felt a great deal of internal conflict about his youngest daughter conceiving a child out of wedlock. In 1973, when Ellis was 4, Ellis’ mother sent her to live with her 66-year-old grandmother in McComb, less than a year after her grandfather had passed. Although they never met, the Rev. Ned Taylor’s reputation as a community leader follows Ellis to this day.
Sundays remained the most important day of the week in the Taylor household. On a typical Sunday morning, Ellis and her grandmother left their home around 8 a.m. to start the church circuit. Each Sunday, they visited one of the four churches that her grandfather had pastored. They started the month at New Home Baptist Church; the following Sunday they visited Mount Olive, then Society Hill, and Summit Baptist the Sunday after that. Even though the churches had new pastors, the parishioners treated Mrs. Myrtis Taylor like a queen mother. Between church and social visits, Ellis and her grandmother usually didn’t get back home until 4 p.m. This was the routine, every Sunday for 15 years.
Ellis tells me how she subconsciously channeled this experience for her role as gospel legend Mattie Moss Clark in “The Clark Sisters: First Ladies of Gospel.” The movie aired on Lifetime in April, and Ellis, 51, renders Clark with such veracity that many have said she was snubbed for an Emmy nomination. She says it wasn’t until her cousins pointed it out that she connected the dots. With her hair pulled back into a tight bun, large glasses, pursed lips, and an efficiency with her words, it’s hard to discern where Dr. Mattie ends and Ellis begins.
Creative storytelling has defined much of her life, but growing up in McComb, Ellis had no idea what was to come. It took her a long time to step into her imagination.
As for her own spiritual journey, Ellis says she has done a full rotation. She went from disavowing church to loving it again. Nowadays, she doesn’t mind the long church services and the heightened emotion, because the love is stronger than the ceremony of it all.
“It’s more cultural than religious. I see it as a need for me in this world that we live in,” she says. “I find it as a respite, resting place, and a place of refuge in a world where I have few of those places. Being in a building, singing songs of worship with other Black people — it is a place of tremendous creativity for us.”
Creative storytelling has defined much of her life, but growing up in McComb, Ellis had no idea what was to come. It took her a long time to step into her imagination. Most of the people in her family were farmers, nurses, and educators, so she thought she’d become a teacher or lawyer. It was the most practical way to not further burden her family.
“What do I look like as a child of this woman who completely gutted her life for me? It was irresponsible. Kids now, they can have another vision of themselves through Instagram, but there was no Instagram back then. My only idea of another reality was on TV, but I was still living in a situation where my grandmother had government cheese in her cabinets.”
Still, Ellis had dreams beyond her circumstances. She knew she liked being creative, but it would be a long time before she knew exactly what that meant. “My grandmother passed away in 1992. She was 86. She never saw me act professionally.” As the daughter of a free spirit, she had to learn to release her own. This is where Jacqueline Taylor comes in.
As much as Ellis was shaped by her grandmother’s strong sense of duty, she says she was also formed by her mother Jacqueline Taylor’s wandering and tenacious spirit.
Ellis says her mother was, for all intents and purposes, a hippie, and her father, who she never knew, was a Vietnam War veteran. Her mother left Mississippi for San Francisco, where Ellis was born. “She was a bohemian, she was in Haight-Ashbury, she did [recreational] drugs. My mom was about that life,” Ellis says. The pregnancy caused much controversy. At the time, as in many strictly religious communities, if a woman got pregnant out of wedlock, she had to go up to the front of the church to apologize. Jacqueline Taylor wasn’t apologizing.
Even when she sent her to live in McComb, Jacqueline Taylor remained a presence in her life, though that presence was always cloaked with mystique. A few years ago, Ellis said, a group of her mother’s classmates mentioned to her that her mom was kicked out of Alcorn State University for protesting during the civil rights movement. Afterward, her mother went to Georgia and worked in the office of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
As Jacqueline Taylor got older, and was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, she and Ellis grew closer. Ellis tells me about when her mother came to live out her final years with her, and they bonded — this time with their roles reversed. Her mother passed in April 2019.
“She was ill for a long time, and she would have these contemplative moments that would turn into these moments of revelation for me about her life,” Ellis says. “One of the things she said to me is, ‘My generation had to turn away from our mother’s choices.’ My mother’s contemporaries are Angela Davis, Assata Shakur, Alice Walker — I see my mom in parallel to a lot of these women. I’ve been thinking about this a lot, women who were coming into their own during this time, and what kind of mothers they became, or did not become, as a result of their creative lives or political lives.”
Her mother’s daring gave Ellis the courage to explore new possibilities, which is how she discovered theater while she was an undergrad at Tougaloo College. There, she met James Barnhill, a retired Brown University professor who guest taught a theater class and directed a play at Tougaloo. Ellis had never considered acting or expressed an interest in theater, but some of her friends were auditioning, so she decided to as well. She got a part and was bitten by the acting bug.
Barnhill encouraged Ellis to leave and find her way to a more established arts program if she was serious about pursuing a career in the arts. In the beginning, she wasn’t certain what she wanted to do, she just liked being creative. So, she did exactly as he said and transferred to Brown University and later earned a master’s degree in acting from New York University.
“He saw something in me that I did not see in myself,” Ellis says. “People act like you have to be able to know and claim your vision all your life, but we have to allow for not knowing. I did not know, but somebody else knew. To me, it was like saying that you could be the next Flo-Jo and run in the Olympics. It was absurd to me.”
Today, she laughs at how green she was. When she arrived in New York, she tried to use land as currency to lease an apartment.
"I was trying to get an apartment, and my credit was shot because while I was at Brown, I had gotten these credit cards. I didn't know you had to pay these people back. Nobody told me that. I needed someone to cosign for me to get an apartment ... I remember going to the leasing office and talking to the leasing agent, and she said, ‘Do you have anybody who can cosign for you?’ and I said, ‘No, I don't, but I got some land I can put up.’ I remember that woman not knowing what to say to my country behind. It's all I knew. For me land is currency. Land is wealth. My grandfather, when he passed away, left all of his sons and daughters 7 acres of land. It was their ‘40 acres and a mule.’ There were all of these stories about who was going to sell their land, who kept their land, paying the taxes on land. It's what I knew. It's what I valued."
Before she finished at NYU, she landed her first professional theater gig. However, she really found her place on large and small screens.
In addition to her acting, Ellis has been a steady voice against the Confederate flag in the Mississippi state flag. In a CNN piece published in June, “Mississippi's blood-stained flag is America's crisis,” she poignantly wrote, “The evidence is clear to me that there are two Gods in Mississippi. The God of the man whose neck is noosed and the God of the man who places the noose.” Mississippi residents will vote on a new design on Nov. 3.
Over the last 25 years, Ellis has seared a broad range of roles into our memories on large and small screens — from a maid who is arrested for stealing a pair of earrings to send her twin sons to college in “The Help” to an enslaved woman trying to find her way home in “The Book of Negroes.” Ellis says her role as background singer Mary Ann Fisher in “Ray,” the Ray Charles biopic, was a turning point in her career because she started to have more fun and stopped worrying about the next gig. It’s hard to forget the “What Kind of Man Are You?” scene when Ellis, as a heartbroken Fisher, hurls a brick through the window of cheating Charles’ new red car.
Ellis also delivered a standout performance in the 2018 film adaptation of James Baldwin’s novel “If Beale Street Could Talk.” In it, she played Mrs. Hunt, a woman who is trying to keep up bourgeois appearances while suffering through abuse and mental illness. Her sublime performance spoke to the ways in which Black women suffer silently in order to protect Black men.
Lately, she has been seen going in and out of time in the first season of the HBO series, “Lovecraft Country.”
In “Lovecraft Country,” set in the late 1950s, she plays Hippolyta Freeman, a woman trying to piece together the story behind her husband’s murder after he’s killed while trying to update a Green Book-style guide. (The real “Negro Motorist Green Book” was a guide published from 1936 to 1966 in order to assist Black travelers in knowing which routes, destinations, restaurants, and hotels welcomed them.) In the context of “Lovecraft Country,” a genre-bending series, there is nothing scarier than racism and sexism. For Ellis, she’s happy to see Black people depicted in science fiction on screen as the center of the narrative and not just as secondary characters.
“It’s a great thing to get out of bed and go do something like ‘Lovecraft Country,’ ‘Book of Negroes,’ or ‘When They See Us,’ there is no separation between who I am personally and what I do for a living,” Ellis says.
Ellis was nominated for an Emmy in 2019 for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Limited Series or Movie for her portrayal of Sharonne Salaam in “When They See Us.” Sharonne Salaam is the mother of Yusef Salaam — one of the boys falsely accused and incarcerated in relation to the sexual assault of a jogger in Central Park in 1989. Ellis captures the devotion of a mother to her child in a heartbreaking performance.
“Sharonne Salaam is a woman who was an Assata Shakur, but unfortunately she ended up fighting for the freedom of her own son,” Ellis says. “I had a conversation with her that changed my life about forgiveness. She said to me, ‘I could never do that. The only way I could do that is if someone cut that memory out of my brain.’ I knew when she said that she meant physically, not metaphorically.”
The series broke open conversations about the urgent need to reform the criminal justice system, a major tenant of the Black Lives Matter movement. For Ellis, the series was an act of restorative justice and an extension of her own dedication to the fight for Black liberation. Her personal fight had already led her back home to Mississippi to challenge the Confederate flag.
In 2014, Ellis’ company, Miss Myrtis Films (named after her grandmother), purchased a billboard on Interstate 55 that spelled out “We Shall Overcome” in Confederate flags. The move drew much criticism from Black and white residents who hated the sign. She was inspired to “wake the beast” when she was in the mall and saw a Black man making T-shirts with the Confederate flag on them at his screenprinting shop. She told the man he couldn’t continue because of what the flag represents in terms of violence against Black people. She knew she had done the right thing when the man’s father called her an agitator and said that there was a man back in the day named Ned Taylor, Ellis’ grandfather, who was a real activist who’d fought for equity.
Ellis didn’t stop there. She’s pressed this issue over the last six years, including publishing op-eds in national news outlets. In a CNN piece published in June, “Mississippi's blood-stained flag is America's crisis,” she poignantly wrote, “The evidence is clear to me that there are two Gods in Mississippi. The God of the man whose neck is noosed and the God of the man who places the noose.”
Later that month, Gov. Tate Reeves signed a bill to change the state flag. Mississippi residents will vote on a new design on Nov. 3.
Ellis wants to follow in the footsteps of women such as Fannie Lou Hamer. Hamer was a sharecropper who joined the SNCC in her 40s to fight for voting rights. While participating in a freedom ride in June 1963, she was arrested and beaten by the police. She never fully recovered physically from the beating, but she continued to advocate for fair labor laws, affordable housing, and voting rights. Before she died in 1977, at the age of 59, Hamer co-founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and the National Women’s Political Caucus.
Aunjanue Ellis stands in the fields of her pastor's cow farm in McComb, Mississippi wearing the dress she wore to the premiere of "If Beale Street Could Talk." Ellis drove home from LA to Mississippi in July because she missed the feeling of dewy grass under her feet.
Ellis is writing and developing a film about Hamer’s life. She has an affinity for rendering southern Black women in their full realities, both in front of and behind the camera. Over the last several months, many studios have been having conversations about diversity, equity, and inclusion. However, when pay equity for Black actresses is mentioned, the conversations often halt. This has motivated Ellis to create her own stories that put Black women in the driver’s seat and allow them to imagine greater possibilities for themselves.
“I want to make bad people mad, and I feel like the work I have done thus far has done that,” Ellis says. “If we don’t remain vigilant, then white America will believe that we already had a national reckoning with race and we can move on. But, we have to remember that anti-Black racism is cyclical and that there will be another George Floyd or Breonna Taylor.”
In addition to telling Hamer’s story, she is developing a fictional television project called “Neshoba” with her younger sister, Sasha Taylor Barnes, about a lynching that takes place in contemporary Mississippi.
With her newfound love of writing, Ellis is also interested in telling romantic stories about queer Black women. During a dinner with friends, she asked them to name a story about queer Black women that isn’t centered in tragedy, and they came up mostly empty. "White queer women’s lit is essentially a genre. Black queer women are not present enough in the novel space. The Color Purple and The Women of Brewster Place cannot be our only literary evidence. Collections like The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deesha Philyaw are adding to the bibliography, but we need more. So much more. So, yes, I want to add to that, either through writing a novel myself or through adaptation."
No matter how much Hollywood calls, Ellis is always most at peace in her grandparents’ home in McComb.
When I started the interview, Ellis was staying in a rental in Los Angeles working on “King Richard,” a film about Venus and Serena Williams’ father and coach, Richard Williams. Ellis plays their mother, Oracene Price. Filming was suspended due to COVID-19. Though the Hollywood Hills were beautiful, she missed being around grass, trees, and nature.
Ellis drove from LA to McComb over the course of two days in July because she missed the feeling of dewy grass under her feet. When she crossed the state border, she stopped at a rest area that previously had the Confederate flag. It was gone.
“To come back in the middle of the night and look up at that flagpole and there’s nothing there,” Ellis says, “I felt a certain type of freedom.”
Kelundra Smith is a theatre critic and arts journalist whose mission is to connect people to cultural experiences and each other. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Oxford American, Food & Wine, American Theatre, and elsewhere. She is the co-chair of the American Theatre Critics Association EDI Committee, and she also teaches workshops about addressing cultural identity in cultural criticism at theaters and universities across the country. Follow her on Instagram @anotherpieceofkay for musings on life, art and everything else.
Imani Khayyam is a photographer located in Jackson, Mississippi, who has the passion to document the authentic vibrancy of people from his community. With a background in art, he finds ways to keep the connection with the subject pure while also adding artistic elements. His work can be viewed at www.imanikhayyam.com.
