Aunjanue-Ellis-Taylor / Photo: Getty Images
*The ugly history of her home state is not lost on Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor. The Mississippi native is very familiar with it and is not afraid to put it on blast for those who are not as familiar with it.
During a recent interview with Indie Wire, Ellis-Taylor confessed to walking out of a Hattiesburg, Mississippi-based restaurant after seeing the Old Mississippi Confederate flag on one of its walls.
“I wanted some catfish,” recalled the “Origin” star, who is noted for protesting the use of the flag, which symbolized white supremacy and Mississippi’s glorification of the Civil War. Until 2021, the flag was the only state flag in the U.S. to incorporate the Confederate battle flag into its design, People noted.
The flag’s removal stemmed from a bill signed into law in 2020 by Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves that removed and replaced the controversial item. Upon seeing the retired flag in the restaurant and questioning the cashier about its presence, Ellis-Taylor stated 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. I got up out of there and I had to get catfish from somewhere else,” Ellis-Tate said.
Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor in ORIGIN (photo cred: Atsushi Nishijima/Courtesy NEON)
Ellis-Taylor’s remembrance comes amid the release of her latest film, “Origin.” The Ava DuVernay-directed feature, based on Isabel Wilkerson’s 2020 non-fiction book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, touches on enduring symbols of discrimination, among others.
Growing up in Mississippi, a state with a history of slavery, segregation and anti-Black racism, Ellis-Taylor is no stranger to the issues presented in “Origin.”
“I come from a culture that wants to redact people who look like me out of the history books,” the 54-year-old “King Richard” Oscar nominee told People. “I intend to right that wrong,”
That intention includes bringing her talents to films like “Origin,” a project that marks the closest Ellis-Taylor has come to work that aligns with her values.
“It is this time, this moment, that we have to look at what we are doing to each other,” she said.
“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 and the Jewish experience, and the knowledge of that gives us more strength to fight those forces that would keep those divisions in place.”
Helming “Origin,” DuVernay mixed the biographical elements of Wilkerson herself with the author’s findings about the fundamental similarities between American racism, Nazi persecution of European Jews and the Dalits of India.
“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 explained about the film to People. “I wish everything I did was ‘Origin,’ tried to achieve the heights that ‘Origin’ tries to achieve.”
But, she laughs, “that’s not the case.” Making a living in Hollywood, she said, “Sometimes you’ve got to pay the rent, you’ve got to pay the mortgage — as Halle Berry so famously said, and Gabrielle Union co-signed on that.”
In addition to great reviews from critics and awards season buzz, “Origin” is noted for pushing against long-standing issues that have divided folks. For Ellis-Taylor, Wilkerson “is a builder of bridges, of tearing down these social divisions that are so fraudulent and stupid.”
The notion of confronting and discussing discrimination allows audiences “to build bridges between each other,” she added. “I feel like books like Caste, films like Origin, invite us to — whether you agree with it or you don’t agree with it — to talk about it.”
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