Why Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor Rejects ‘Hollywood Hooey’ and Still Lives in the South: ‘Work to Be Done There’ (Exclusive)

Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor is much more at home in the South than in Hollywood. And that’s not just figurative: Though she’s starred in a slew of critically acclaimed movies, the Oscar nominee has split her time between Atlanta and her home state of Mississippi. 

“I’m a Southerner, newsflash,” Ellis-Taylor, 55, quips wryly. “I always have to have some part of me — a thumb, or an elbow, or a knee — in the South.”

Born in San Francisco and a graduate of Brown University and New York University but raised on her grandmother’s farm in Mississippi, the Nickel Boys star has a simple explanation for remaining true to her roots: “There’s work to be done there. There’s work to be done everywhere, and you can’t do that work unless you’re present.”

Plus, navigating the industry in Los Angeles often feels “strange,” she tells PEOPLE. “My friend calls it ‘Hollywood hooey.’ … I want to do my job.”

Ellis-Taylor calls herself “very vocal about how I feel about stuff in the world,” which has been an asset to her impressive career since her Oscar-nominated breakout in King Richard with Will Smith.

“These directors might hear that and they’re like, ‘Oh, that’s the lady we want and need,’ ” she admits. “I’ve had a lot of [jobs] that have, I would say, aligned with how I see the world, how I fight things that I don’t agree with in the world, what I want to bring visibility to.”

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In the past year alone, her résumé has included Ava DuVernay’s Isabel Wilkerson adaptation Origin, about a writer uncovering the roots of discrimination; The Supremes at Earl’s All-You-Can-Eat, a tale of sisterly friendship in mid-century America costarring Sanaa Lathan and Uzo Aduba; Lee Daniels’ Andra Day-starring demonic horror flick The Deliverance; and the André Holland-led Exhibiting Forgiveness, a story of art healing trauma. 

Is the fact that they’re all made by Black filmmakers and about the Black experience intentional? “Yeah,” Ellis-Taylor says with a smile. “Shamelessly so.”

Not only did Nickel Boys, director RaMell Ross’ buzzy adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s novel, fit that bill, it gave Ellis-Taylor the opportunity to tell a distinctly Southern piece of history. She plays Hattie, the grandmother of a Black teen in 1960s Florida sent to an abusive reform school called Nickel Academy — a version of the real-life Dozier School for Boys and other segregated institutions like it. 

“We all need to be more informed about these schools and their prevalence around the country, that this is not an isolated thing,” she says. For an untold number of boys who faced systemic abuse in reform schools, a “conspiracy of silence,” as she puts it, allowed it to continue for decades. 

“We have the power to give these children a voice, to grieve for them, and in that grieving become active in making it right,” says Ellis-Taylor. Nickel Boys is “our shot, our chance doing for these children what no one did, which was hear them.”

Nickel Boys, which stars Ethan Herisse, Brandon Wilson, Hamish Linklater, Fred Hechinger and Daveed Diggs, is in select theaters Dec. 13. Among Ellis-Taylor’s upcoming projects is the movie adaptation of Todd Connor’s autobiographical novel Liz Here Now, about a Black maid standing up to a white family’s child abuse in the 1960s.