Bringing A Different Side Of James Brown To The Big Screen

"I fancy myself one in the bathtub and in the shower,” Nelsan Ellis admits, laughing, “but not in public.” Yet here he is in Get On Up, the biopic on the late James Brown directed by The Help’s Tate Taylor. While the filmmakers thought he wasn’t the ideal fit for the lead role, they did see his resemblance to Brown’s longtime friend and collaborator Bobby Byrd, which made him a natural for the pivotal supporting part. A good thing too, because Ellis’ solid, sympathetic turn as a talented man in the shadow of a really talented man goes a long way towards helping audiences deal with the hot-tempered, egotistic excesses of Brown, played magnificently by Chadwick Boseman.

“They were dudes, they were homies,” Ellis says of the Byrd/Brown relationship. “They’d grown up together since they were teenagers; basically they were brothers. You know James Brown’s family abandoned him; Bobby never did. Bobby Byrd was his supporter, his anchor – he was consistent, he was always there for him; he loved the man, admired the man. Bobby Byrd was his family.”

While Byrd was an accomplished singer-songwriter, he was happy – to a point – to let Brown enjoy the spotlight. “For the most part, I connected with Bobby Byrd’s devotion, admiration and pure love for James Brown. How humble the dude was to recognise ‘Oh, he’s the great one, I’m going to take a step back and just learn from him, I know he’s better than me.’ There is a line in the movie that goes ‘He’s the frontman, I’m not.’”

In a way, that relationship was mirrored in how Ellis and Boseman related on set. “Every single moment of working with him I loved,” Ellis says of his co-star. “I never told him this but he actually changed me as an actor. My work ethic is much higher now because Chad is a worker – he just gets in there and does it. And he is so generous – he is never lazy, never sitting there and you see something blank in his eyes and you have to create this moment all by yourself. I actually got lost sometimes. I’m not that dude that goes on set and is like ‘I’m Bobby Byrd for real and you’re James Brown for real.’ No, you’re Chad, I’m Nelsan and we’re hired to play pretend, but there were moments where I got lost because he was James Brown at times.”

Ellis’ admiration for his Get On Up co-stars is matched by that for his co-stars on TV series, True Blood, which concluded last year after seven seasons. “It’s the same thing. You’re working with great actors and you learn from them. I’m a thief. I’m going to miss that, you know? I mean, we had babies all together too. We started this show with no families, and then we had families. We made families together. I’m going to miss seven years of a family. I’m going to lose 14 families.”