Please Rewind Talent Wall

Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor

Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor has built a career that moves confidently between stage, television and film, with a particular gift for making supporting characters feel fully lived-in. Born in San Francisco on February 21, 1969, she was raised on her grandmother’s farm in Magnolia, Mississippi. She attended Tougaloo College before transferring to Brown University, where she earned a degree in African-American studies, then continued her acting training at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Her professional debut came on Broadway in 1995, playing Ariel opposite Patrick Stewart’s Prospero in The Tempest. After making her screen debut on New York Undercover, Ellis-Taylor took a co-leading role in the 1996 independent film Girls Town and joined the ABC police drama High Incident as Officer Leslie Joyner. Those early parts established the shape of a career that would resist a single lane. Her film work has ranged from Undercover Brother and Ray to The Help, Get On Up and Barry Jenkins’s If Beale Street Could Talk. Television has offered equally substantial material. She led the 2015 miniseries The Book of Negroes as Aminata Diallo, receiving a Critics’ Choice Television Award nomination and winning a Canadian Screen Award. Her performance in Ava DuVernay’s When They See Us brought a Primetime Emmy nomination, while Lovecraft Country earned her another Emmy nomination. In King Richard, Ellis-Taylor played Oracene Price opposite Will Smith. The performance brought her first Academy Award nomination, along with BAFTA and Golden Globe nominations and a National Board of Review award for Best Supporting Actress. She later reunited with DuVernay for Origin, portraying author Isabel Wilkerson in her first lead role in a major film. Her recent work continues to show that range: the crime drama Justified: City Primeval, the musical drama The Color Purple, the friendship-centered adaptation The Supremes at Earl’s All-You-Can-Eat, the family drama Exhibiting Forgiveness and the Colson Whitehead adaptation Nickel Boys. Across them, Ellis-Taylor remains an actor attentive to character, history and the emotional weight carried into a room.