“King Richard” star Aunjanue Ellis explains what it took for Oracene Price, mother of Serena and Venus Williams, to manifest history for her girls.

I start describing the trope, and actress Aunjanue Ellis starts to give herself whiplash.

We’re speaking in Georgia at the SCAD Savannah Film Festival, where Ellis is being presented with the Outstanding Achievement in Cinema Award for her performance in the new film King Richard.

This is a film starring Will Smith as the domineering and controversial father of Venus and Serena Williams, the man whose unconventional coaching methods and unflappable conviction that his daughters would make history warrants, well, a film that stars Will Smith.

But the King has his Queen, and the remarkable thing about the film and Ellis’ performance is the insistence that she also has her crown.

Williams,” Ellis says about Oracene Price, the mother of the Williams sisters, who she plays in King Richard.

(L-R): Saniyya Sidney (Venus Williams), Demi Singleton (Serena Williams) and Aunjanue Ellis (Oracene Price) in King Richard.

But with the Will Smith conversation of it all threatening to drown out all other talk, it’s a testament to the work that people—often just as loudly—are talking about Aunjanue Ellis.

Filmmakers Reinaldo Marcus Green, who directed King Richard, and Zach Baylin, who wrote it, had conducted extensive interviews with Oracene Price prior to the movie going into production.

Oracene was the builder of that dream,” Ellis says.

(It’s Oracene, as we see in the film, who helps Venus and Serena perfect their assassin serves.) “I was like, y’all don’t want somebody else to do this?” Ellis remembers, searching for a body double.

It was also Oracene who helped prepare Venus and Serena for what it was going to mean to be Black women in the public eye.

“I could never repay them for the joy they brought into my life,” she says about Venus and Serena.

“I’m all over the place and open with my feelings,” Ellis says.

Venus and Serena joined as producers after seeing the film, and have been an integral part of a promotional tour that centers a message of what it took—the audacity and the struggle—for a Black man from Compton to manifest the power that was always within the Black women he surrounded himself with, but which society refused to see.

Serena, mother Oracene and Venus Williams pose for the media during the Lipton Championships on March 20, 1999, in Key Biscayne, Florida.

Ellis is playing Oracene at a time when Venus and Serena were young girls, before they became superstars in the public eye.

Of course, the actress is a fan, though Ellis confesses that she gets so stressed out when either sister plays—she so desperately wants them to win—that she can only watch replays of matches once she knows the outcome.

But they are so much more than that,” Ellis says