'The Color Purple' Actress Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor Calls Out Her Own Movie for Erasing Queer Romance

Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor has some criticism for her movie The Color Purple.

The 54-year-old actress, who received an Oscar nomination for King Richard and wide acclaim for her performance in this year’s film Origin, had a small role in the new movie musical as Celie’s mom.

In a new interview with Buzzfeed, Aunjanue was asked for her thoughts on the backlash the movie received for erasing queer romance. The relationship between Celie and Shug Avery is much more prominent in the book and stage musical than it was in either film adaptations.

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“The Color Purple is a book about Black lesbians. Whether the choice was made to focus on that or not in the cinematic iterations of The Color Purple, it’s still a movie about Black lesbians. People can try to say the story is about sisterhood, but it’s a story about Black lesbians. Period,” Aunjanue said.

She continued, “What is hard for me is that when we have those spaces where we can honor the truth of that, we walk away from it. We suppress it. We hide it. We sanitize it. In the sanitizing of it, someone like me — knowing that The Color Purple is a book about Black lesbians — looks at that and thinks, ‘You’re sanitizing me and my friends, and other people who I love and adore. Why?’ [If it's because] you don’t want to be offensive, then you’re saying to the world that I’m offensive.”

“The first time that I saw The Color Purple, it [was] before I understood who I was. I knew that watching Margaret Avery kiss Whoopi Goldberg was astonishing, exciting, and affirming. It showed me the possibility of myself and the possibility to love a woman who loves me in return. I’ll never get over that. It lives with me. It’s hard seeing so much about the film [being discussed], but [the queer element] is the least discussed. Why are we talking about it almost in a sort of incidental way?” Aunjanue added.

She said, “Alice Walker wrote The Color Purple with intention because she was writing about herself. I just want that part of the book to be portrayed in the films with intention, instead of it being incidental. I want people to walk away from The Color Purple thinking, ‘I just saw a movie about Black lesbians.’ I don’t think that has happened.”

The Color Purple is now streaming on Max.