Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor.Photo:Rodin Eckenroth/Getty
Rodin Eckenroth/Getty
Aunjanue Ellis-Tayloris not afraid to stand up for what she believes in.
The star ofAva DuVernay’s new filmOrigingrew up in Mississippi, a state whose history of slavery, segregation and anti-Black racism she knows all too well. “I come from a culture,” she tells PEOPLE, “that wants to redact people who look like me out of the history books.”
“My intention is to right that wrong,” says the 54-year-oldKing RichardOscar nominee.
Case in point: she has protested use of theold Mississippi flag, which was until 2021 the only state flag in America to incorporate the Confederate battle flag into its design. In 2020 Mississippi governor Tate Reeves signed into law a bill that removed andreplacedthe symbol of white supremacy and Civil War glorification.
In a recent interview withIndieWire, Ellis-Taylor recalled seeing the Confederate-emblazoned flag at a restaurant in Hattiesburg. “I wanted some catfish,” she told the outlet. But after asking the cashier about the retired flag’s presence, the actress said they “just tried to evade any culpability.”
“I said, ‘You have people in this restaurant now who are Black, who are eating your food, who are working in this restaurant, and you have the flag of the Confederacy, the flag of the Ku Klux Klan on your walls.’ And sitting under the flag were two Black men eating.”
She concluded: “I got up out of there and I had to get catfish from somewhere else.”
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Enduring symbols of discrimination like Confederate monuments are some of the many issues at stake inOrigin, which is based on Isabel Wilkerson’s 2020 non-fiction bookCaste: The Origins of Our Discontents.
“I think it is brave creatively, I think it is brave in its message, I think it confronts things in a way that is innovative,” Ellis-Taylor tells PEOPLE. “I wish everything I did wasOrigin, tried to achieve the heights thatOrigintries to achieve.”
But, she adds with a laugh, “that’s not the case.” Making a living in Hollywood, she says, “Sometimes you’ve got to pay the rent, you’ve got to pay the mortgage — asHalle Berryso famously said, andGabrielle Unionco-signed on that.”
Origin.Atsushi-Nishijima/Courtesy NEON
Atsushi-Nishijima/Courtesy NEON
“What’s happening is not central, it’s not just the American experience. It’s an experience that is vast, it’s wide, it’s cross-cultural, it crosses time. We are connected to the Indian experience, we are connected to the Jewish experience, and the knowledge of that gives us more strength to fight those forces that would keep those divisions in place.”
Ellis-Taylor doesn’t take it for granted that her movie pushes against such divisions. Wilkerson, she says, “is a builder of bridges, of tearing down these social divisions that are so fraudulent and stupid.”
Confronting and discussing discrimination allows audiences “to build bridges between each other,” she adds.
“I feel like books likeCaste, films likeOrigin, invite us to — whether you agree with it or you don’t agree with it — to talk about it.”
Originis in theaters now.
For more from Ellis-Taylor, pick up the latest issue ofPEOPLE, on newsstands everywhere now.
source: people.com
