Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor wins IMDb STARmeter Award, talks 'darkness' in early career before 'something switched'

Success did not come overnight for Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor.

Accepting the IMDb "Fan Favorite" STARmeter Award during IMDb, Women in Film, and EW's dinner party at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival on Monday, the Emmy- and Oscar-nominated actress reflected on the decades she spent filming projects that either fizzled or never even saw the light of day.

"I was in a womb," the 54-year-old said during her acceptance speech at the dinner party, thrown at RIME at The St. Regis Deer Valley in Park City, Utah. "I was working in the darkness."

But then "something changed," she continued, "and I just want to acknowledge the people who ordered that path for me."

Ellis-Taylor — who made her professional acting debut opposite Patrick Stewart in a Broadway revival of William Shakespeare's The Tempest — went on to thank four directors: Christine Swanson, who cast her in the 2020 Lifetime movie The Clark Sisters: First Ladies of Gospel; Ava DuVernay, who directed her to her first Emmy nomination for Netflix's 2019 limited series When They See Us; showrunner Misha Green, who directed her to a second Emmy nomination for HBO's 2020 drama Lovecraft Country; and Reinaldo Marcus Green, who directed her to a 2022 Oscar nomination for King Richard.

"And then once again Ava DuVernay cast me — what’s wrong with this woman — in Origin," Ellis-Taylor continued, referencing her latest major motion picture, an adaptation of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson's Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. "Talk about living up to the spirit of women in film. She defied protocol, expectation, permits to create what I believe is the people’s movie. And I’m not saying this because we haven’t gotten any awards. I’m saying it because Isabelle Wilkerson has written this book, Caste, that has given us a new language to practice humanity. Ava took up the baton and had given this offering to the world. Go see it."

Ellis-Taylor then turned her attention to her latest Sundance drama, Exhibiting Forgiveness, directed by a first-time film director, contemporary painter Titus Kaphar, "who I think is one of the most important voices in American art, and soon to be one of the most important voices in cinema. Hopefully it’ll get a distributor and you go see that."

"If you’re one of these people who think things, ish ain't fair, ish ain’t balanced, that’s facts," Ellis-Taylor told the room, which included 9-1-1: Lone Star actor Rafael Silva, God Save Texas: The Price of Oil director Alex Stapleton, Madam Secretary star and Creative Coalition president Tim Daly, and more. "What’s exciting for me is working with organizations like [Women in Film] — thank you so much — to change that."

IMDb’s STARmeter Awards honor celebrities who have trended high on the IMDbPro STARmeter chart, with its rankings determined by the actual page views of the more than 200 million fans who visit IMDb every month.

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