Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor explains why “Origin” was 'one of the hardest things' she's made — and why it's so personal

The Oscar and Emmy nominee reunites with Ava DuVernay, Niecy Nash-Betts, and Jon Bernthal for the profound biopic.

Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor had heard Ava DuVernay was adapting Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson's Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents into a film, but the Oscar- and Emmy-nominee "didn't think I had a shot in hell at being a part of it, honestly," she tells EW with a laugh. "I just feel like some things are just too good for me to be in."

But she wasn't about to let it pass her by that quickly. So the King Richard star put her best foot — er, photo — forward. Realizing she could style herself to look like Wilkerson, she "ordered a nice sheath dress from one of those stores — Bloomingdale's or Nordstrom or whatever," then added pearls for a touch of elegance, and styled her hair like Wilkerson's.

It got DuVernay's attention. "I went to Savannah and I met with her and we had this hour-long conversation," Ellis-Taylor recalls. "I did not leave there thinking that I had the job — she certainly didn't offer it to me at the moment. And I went back to Wilmington where I was filming, and I just taped and taped and taped and taped and taped and taped and taped, and never felt satisfied with what I did. And in the middle of this rush of taping, she stopped that by calling me and telling me I had the job."

A job that became very personal, for a variety of reasons. The film, Origin (currently playing in select theaters and expanding Jan. 19), centers on Wilkerson's global journey researching her 2020 bestseller, which examines how it's not race or class that have, throughout history and to this day, oppressed people and cultures around the world but rather a caste system — made of up eight pillars — that ranks humans and their importance to each other. In the process, she experiences some devastating losses that deeply impact her life.

Below, Ellis-Taylor discusses her own journey with the film and how it's part of her bigger purpose as an actress.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: There are so many different emotional beats that we see on Isabel's journey. How did you navigate each of those? Did you compartmentalize and just take one thing at a time?

AUNJANUE ELLIS-TAYLOR: With a journey like that, you have to take it one day at a time. For what you have to do in order to corral all those emotions when you need to do that, for very practical reasons, you can't look at it [like,] This is what I'm going to do in this role. You have to be like, This is what I'm going to do today. You even have to micromanage it a little bit more than that... Okay, this is what I'm doing on this take — and pray for the best. The other side of that is, because it's so emotional and so much is asked of what I'm doing — and not just me, you see that in Niecy Nash as well, that we are dealing with grief and dying and sickness — and you don't want that to be indulgent. You want to stay honest. You don't want to perform. I didn't want to perform grief. So I took it moment by moment and tried to just meet the moment.

So how did you find your way around that? Not playing grief.

Well, I live with it. Isabel had a romance with her mother — a beautiful romance with her mother. And I had a romance with my mother. My mother was the love of my life. Nobody has matched her in terms of the depth of feeling I have had for any person living or dead. So I know what it's like to have that snatched away from me. She wasn't just my mother — she was my best friend, she was my cheerleader, she was my shopping buddy. [Laughs] She was my gossiper, my fellow sister gossiper. She was all of those things to me. And so I was able to employ that in service of what I had to do with the film.

Isabel goes through a few losses in this film... there is a moment where Isabel is on the phone saying goodbye to someone close to her who's dying. It's such a deeply profound and emotional and quiet moment. She says all of the things that I would hope to be able to say to someone I love in that moment, but I just can't imagine being so articulate. So what was it like to film that scene?

We shot that scene at this palace in India...

The backdrop of it was just stunning. There was a certain peace about it.

Yes! I felt like I was the only person on the planet. I was that alone. I wasn't able to be on the phone with that character, but I felt the memory of our scenes because I felt such an intimacy between us in our scenes, so I was able to carry that with me to India, and all of that was coursing through me when I was saying those words. In fact, Ava said that that is what Ms. Wilkerson said she did say to her loved one. But listen, if I am talking to someone in that situation, it's going to sound ridiculous. But if you're Isabel Wilkerson and you have this command of language and can meet a moment like that, even a moment like that with poetry.

I was a mess during that scene. So having said all of that with these various losses and how you navigated through those, what kind of impact does that have on you as the person who has taken on the responsibility of becoming this woman and telling her story?

I'm going to be honest, there were times where I had to say to Ava, "I need you to say 'cut' right now because I physically can't do this anymore." And it wasn't so much exhaustion, but it did feel like I was hitting that guardrail of indulgence, and I did not want to do that. Whenever I felt like I was just producing tears in production, I was like, I got to stop this. Or, it became too personal for me and it didn't have anything to do with what I was doing. Because you have to make a separation — yes, I can bring my grief to work with me, and it unfortunately served me, but at the same time, I'm still playing Isabel Wilkerson and I'm not playing myself.

You had to protect yourself, you mean.

That, and protect the character. I could roll out on the street and be a mess any doggone day at any time because that's what's going on in my 24-7. But that's not who she is. Even in the midst of her pain and great loss, there's this elegance, there's this poise, there is this awareness. And that is something, honestly, that was challenging to me —very challenging to me — because in moments where I felt that I would personally be aggressive, she was fearful. In moments that I felt demanded boldness, she would be withheld. In moments where I wanted to yell, she chose silence. And that was very hard for me because it made me feel like I wasn't doing anything. And because of that, in terms of character work, it's one of the hardest things I've ever done...to simplify the expression of things and hold things in and trust that you are communicating even if you feel like you are not.

In addition to Ava, who you got to reunite with here, you also reunited with a couple other folks. I want to start with Jon Bernthal. Did you, by chance, suggest him to play Isabel's husband?

No, I didn't. What's so crazy is that I worked with Jon on King Richard and we were in a couple of scenes together, but we never really exchanged dialogue. I remember teasing him one day about his short shorts. [Laughs] That was about the limit of our communication. I had a tremendous amount of respect for him as an actor — he's one of the best, period. [Ava told me that] he flew himself from California to Savannah to talk to her about playing this part — he lobbied for himself to be in this role. And he and I just became one of the most — if you have one of these, you are a lucky person — he became my friend. We fought for Brett and Isabel; we fought for them with each other, we fought for them with Ava. It was a partnership that we built. I have such fondness for Jon Bernthal. He's such a lovely human being, and truly one of the best actors ever... He's brawn, but he is brain — he's incredibly smart. And he's an incredibly sensitive cat. He walks in love, and he cracks me up. And so often, we would be cracking up and Ava would say "action" and it would just be an extension of what we were doing off-camera anyway. I'm glad people get to see him this way.

Your other reunion is Niecy Nash-Betts, your costar from When They See Us, as Isabel's cousin, Marion. These two have a really deep connection. What were you most excited to show with that relationship?

Well, Niecy and I were enemies on When They See Us, so I was excited to play with her in a much more friendly manner. She is such an honest actor — nothing comes out of her mouth that's not believable. When she opens her mouth, she opens her mouth in truth. And I love working with actors like that because you get permission to not perform. It becomes so easy. It is. You just get to breathe. And I just enjoyed working with her.

If we zoom out and take a look at your career as a whole, you've been working steadily for some 30 years, delivering some fantastic performances that whole time. And maybe it's because of social media, I don't know, but it seems like the last five years or so there's been a different type of momentum. Do you feel that? And if so, what do you think changed?

Yeah, I think it started probably about 10 years ago. I was flailing wherever I was in the world, New York or something like that, and I moved back to Mississippi. At the time, I was taking care of someone in my life that needed my income in order to be well. It was that simple. And then I was back home in Mississippi where all these things that I sort of ignored in my childhood I could not ignore anymore. And the reality of Mississippi is that it is a neo-Confederate state, period. And those things kind of fed me and it lit something in me that I said, "I have to make this work," and I just stopped accepting no. I stopped accepting no from people, from directors and cast. I just stopped it. But I also stopped accepting no from myself. So that sort of seed was planted, and then — I would say, you're right, I think about five years ago — the universe was like, okay, all right, we hear you. And I started working on project after project where I felt that my purpose — which is honestly to use my work and then use the income to fight these folks in Mississippi — has really converged with the kind of work that I do offscreen, but do onscreen as well... So these ideas that were in Caste and now in Origin, they're not abstract to me; they're my life.

So this movie was not just another role for you.

Not at all. I look at Isabel — I don't know how Ava feels about this metaphor — as being this journalistic, literary Indiana Jones who is going on this quest to find this truth about who we are as human beings in this world that we are in. And along the way, she's being chased by these ghosts, this grief... but she's not deterred because she knows that at the end of this quest, she will find something that will help save humanity. And I look at it as nothing less than that.

This interview has been condensed for clarity and length.

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