Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor Is ‘Still Processing’ the Profound, Painful Experience of Making ‘Origin’

Writer-director Ava DuVernay met author Isabel Wilkerson more than a dozen times while researching “Origin,” her movie based on Wilkerson’s book “Caste: the Origins of our Discontent.” Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, the actress who played Wilkerson, did not. Wilkerson is an intensely private person, and Ellis-Taylor instead watched the author’s TED talk and read and reread the book after winning the part.

“Ava said she wanted to do a story that explored the interior life of a woman,” Ellis-Taylor said. “A woman thinking. A woman in the middle of processing grand, huge, vast ideas, and dramatizing that. I thought that was rare. Rare to see a woman, Black or white, so that you are interested in the genius of the woman, not what her body looks like, not being an appendage to a man.