Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor still feels caught in the whirlwind of Origin. She went out on a limb to score the lead role in the production that started less than a year ago, and only months later made a splashy bow in Venice. “It feels like something I don't want to let go,” she tells me. “It feels so fast.”

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There’s a deep connection Ellis-Taylor communicates about the film, and particularly the role of Isabel Wilkerson, an author and scholar whose provocative and profound ideas about class and stratification in global history make up the book Caste. Director Ava DuVernay took her ambitious theories and decided to make a movie out of them, both by dramatizing her central areas of inquiry—taking the production from the contemporary U.S. to Nazi Germany to India—and by turning the focus on Wilkerson herself, paralleling her personal journey with her brilliant investigative work. Ellis-Taylor herself had already been a big fan of the Pulitzer Prize-winner’s work. In Origin, she embodies a woman asking huge questions about humanity while experiencing incredible personal loss—a nuanced character arc that DuVernay weaves into the fabric of her emotional cinematic epic.

Ellis-Taylor has experienced a swift rise in Hollywood after years of “toiling in oblivion,” as she put it to me years ago. Last year, she earned her first Oscar nomination for stealing scenes in King Richard, and this is now the richest lead role of her screen career, and she makes good on it with a performance of astounding vulnerability and intellectual prowess. Frustratingly, she and the film, which was acquired out of Venice by Neon, have been struggling for a place in this year’s awards conversation, despite strong reviews and audience response out of festivals. Ellis-Taylor has taken it upon herself to get the word out during Oscar nominations voting (which ends Tuesday) and ahead of the movie’s January 19 theatrical release. Her ultimate hope is that Origin is simply seen.

“My prayer for this film is that it won’t be in vain,” she says of the work to get here. “I know that it will continue to be a grassroots thing, and honestly, I'm not mad about that. I wish we had millions of dollars, so our billboards could be everywhere—it would just make it certainly easier for us—but going to the people, getting the folks involved in it, feels consistent with the spirit of the book.”

In conversation with Vanity Fair, Ellis-Taylor breaks down one of the most complex and fascinating figures she’s ever portrayed.

Vanity Fair: Last time you and I spoke, you’d mentioned the lengths you went to, to get this part, in sending Ava pictures of yourself and Isabel Wilkerson side by side. Can you tell me that story and how you so quickly saw yourself in this woman, this character?

Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor: Yeah, I did it. [Laughs] When I knew that there was a conversation about actually making the film, I said, “I want to be in that conversation, I want to be a part of that.” I started looking at her and I said to myself, “If I did the right things, I could make myself look like her.” She has a sort of iconic look. She has pearls, she wears this burgundy sheath dress. I said to my sister, “We’re going to make me look like that.” So we ordered a dress from Nordstrom’s or Bloomingdale’s, I can’t remember which; I got the right makeup at the beauty supply place in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and got me a nice wig. My sister ordered me some pearls from Amazon because Ms. Wilkerson wears pearls often. And I had her take a picture of me, and we sent it to Aisha Coley, who was the casting director for the film.

Amazing. Then of course you get cast and you’re tasked with playing this character. Did you still find you wanted to be as exacting as possible in playing her, or did you feel more comfortable maybe doing your own interpretation?

I own up to that I’m not good in mimicry, especially with someone who is as nuanced as Ms. Wilkerson is. So it would’ve been a complete failure if that was my attempt…. The work that I did was not so much, “How do I sound like Ms. Wilkerson?” as it was, “How do I receive information in the way that Ms. Wilkerson appears to receive information? How do I interpret that information? How do I handle fear? How do I handle discomfort? How do I express love and affection?” She does this TED Talk that came out with Warmth of Other Suns, and I can tell that she’s so nervous—she’s holding onto her cards and looking up and then looking down at the cards, and that just told me so much about her. The character work is responding in a way that does not feel natural to me. She’s very withheld. She’s very poised. She thinks before she speaks. And that’s not who I am at all. That’s character work.

Not a lot of people think like her, which is what’s exciting about her, and I would imagine also very challenging about playing her. How did you engage with Caste, the book, and its ideas? Did that inform the performance too?

Yeah. I had to read and reread and reread again. I’m still reading, honestly. When I’m having to talk to people like you, and do panels, I want to make sure that I am representing her ideas as well as I can, because someone’s going to ask you. I had the crib sheet when I was doing the film, and that was good, but it’s not enough. We did those sequences in the film where I’m writing the pillars of Caste on the whiteboard, and I told Ava I did not want to write any of them unless I understood what it was. That meant for me getting things explained to me by Ava, reading those passages—the eight pillars of Caste that are in the book, reading those over and over and over again.

How did you find her writing and arguments, from one read to the next?

What is so brilliant about Ms. Wilkerson is that she’s a scholar, but she doesn’t write in a scholarly academic way. She writes in a way that is accessible. I get frustrated with academic writing because you have these tremendous scholars who have these brilliant ideas, but the people who they want to change don’t understand them. Honestly, David, I used to feel ashamed that I wasn’t smart enough to get it. But it is another kind of language that’s a particular kind of writing, right? I find it very inaccessible. And when you’re writing ideas that could affect how people think about violence, how people think about caring for each other and caring for the world, you don’t have that privilege to speak in language that folks can’t understand. Ms. Wilkerson understands that, and she writes in a way that a regular person like me can get it. So it just demanded my going home and reading, waking up and reading, and doing it over and over and over again until I got it.

I’d say that goes especially for the pillars, which mark the culmination of the movie, in many ways—all of her ideas coming together.

The thing is that those pillars, I have lived that, and we all have lived that in ways that we’re not aware of. Thank God that we’re talking about this because now we can be aware of it. One of those pillars being how terrorism is used as a means of control—being from Mississippi and knowing that these statues, these flags, they’re not just benign hagiography. We’re erecting this thing because we want to honor our heroes? No. They’re used as a way to remind Black folks where they came from in those places.

I think one of the ways that you honor her writing in your performance is through emotion. That reflects the reality of what she’s writing about. Can you talk about accessing that part of it, the real emotional part of her journey in the film as well as the emotionality of the ideas?

I cannot express enough that what you see me do in the film is what was actually happening in my life as I played the role. Because while I’m performing this, I’m at the same time trying to understand these ideas. I’m going to India and talking to people who are really Dalits. So when I’m listening to them in the scenes, I’m actually writing down what they’re saying. They’re telling me their experiences. So this is happening for me. It’s being filmed, but it’s happening in real time. And Ms. Wilkerson had this epic romance with her mother. I had an epic romance with my mother, and losing her changed me to this day. I have to remind myself, “Okay, why am I doing whatever I’m doing today?” Because my reason for doing it no longer exists as I knew it. So I get that. I could take that to work with me every day and pull from that. Then you think about the fact that she lost her best friend, the love of her life, her mother, all in the span of 16 months—and then she writes this book. Good Lord. I think about that. It just gives me chills. I wanted to feel all of that, and I did, whether I wanted to or not. I felt it.

Can you say a little bit more about working in the different countries, encountering all of these different cultures during production? I imagine that was new for you.

It’s a testament to the kind of filmmaker that Ava is. If it’s hot, she wants you to feel heat. If it’s cold, she wants you to be cold. She wants to have her actors experience something in real time. Some of the stuff that you saw in India when we were walking across that intersection, and I’m going to see the professors there, Suraj—we were in that intersection, and I was scared to death! God protected us, I can only say that. [Laughs] And that scene where I say goodbye to my sister, Marion [played by Niecy Nash-Betts], we shot it in this palace in India. The way that we shot it just felt large and vast. The book-burning scene was shot in the square that actually happened in. I wasn’t in that scene, but my hotel room looked over the plaza, and they shot all night. I’d just look outside and see all the hundreds of background artists, and our cast members in that cold, filming that work. There was no CGI in that. That was hundreds of German actors. All of that affected me. It made what I did feel larger than the page.

This interview has been edited and condensed.