Teyana Taylor is – as she often says to interviewers – the entertainment equivalent of “a Glade plug-in” air freshener: put her in “any socket” and she will make “every room smell good”. And, at 34, she has the CV to prove it. After kicking off her career at 15 as a choreographer for Beyoncé (she later showcased her own moves to millions in the headline-grabbing video for Kanye West’s 2016 single Fade), the New York native began making her own critically acclaimed, cutting-edge R&B. She has also acted in a slew of movies and TV shows – including an award-winning turn as a mother who kidnaps her son from the care system in 2023’s A Thousand and One – and worked as a creative director for brands and a host of other musicians.
But Taylor also likens herself to another household item. “I am a sponge,” she says. “I’m never above being a student.” This was especially true on the set of her latest project, Paul Thomas Anderson’s vigilante group caper One Battle After Another. Observing castmates including Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn and Benicio del Toro – plus the director himself (to many, the greatest of his generation) – turned her into “SpongeBob SquarePants. I get to have my notebook and take all these notes and soak everything in.”
Having seen her in action as the film’s swaggering, libidinous revolutionary Perfidia Beverly Hills, it is extremely difficult to imagine Taylor hunched in the corner between takes, scribbling down acting tips. On screen, she is absolutely cocksure, whether demanding fellow vigilante Ghetto Pat (DiCaprio) have sex with her on a car bonnet in the two minutes before the bomb they’ve just planted explodes, instructing Penn’s Colonel Lockjaw at gunpoint to get an erection, or firing off rounds with a machine gun resting on her heavily pregnant stomach before proclaiming: “Bitch! I felt like Tony Montana!”
That priceless line was Taylor’s own. Anderson, she says, would frequently ask her to “do that thing that you do”, which meant “stop worrying about your lines” and “add my extra little spice to it”. Anderson had been impressed by her performance in A Thousand and One, she says. He ran the idea of casting her by DiCaprio, “knowing that me and Leo is cool” (the pair became pals after meeting a few years ago at Diana Ross’s birthday party). The punt paid off: the film’s first act relies almost entirely on Taylor’s ability to channel an alarming maelstrom of lust, fury, recklessness and righteousness in a crop top and cargo pants. She pulls it off with aplomb.
When we speak, Taylor is in her hotel room in LA; One Battle After Another had its premiere in the city a couple of days earlier, generating instant Oscar buzz. Steven Spielberg describing it as “insane” and “really incredible” certainly helped. Taylor is thrilled: “That means he knows who I am, he knows what I look like!” she says with hushed disbelief.
Soon, many more will know. One Battle After Another is likely to be one of the season’s biggest blockbusters – the car chases alone are worth the price of admission – but as you’d expect from Anderson, whose eclectic oeuvre includes Boogie Nights, Punch-Drunk Love, There Will Be Blood and Phantom Thread, this is by no means standard Hollywood fare. Loosely based on Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland, it combines political satire, stoner comedy, social realism and slick heist-film styling to chronicle the activities of the French 75, a fictional revolutionary gang who liberate immigration camps and rob banks for funds, before fast-forwarding 16 years to the moment when Perfidia’s daughter is kidnapped.
As a protagonist, Perfidia is morally ambivalent, to put it mildly (the clue’s in the name), and it is her relationship with Penn’s brutal yet pathetic wannabe white supremacist that triggers the action. “I think she’s badass, I think she’s complex, I think she’s selfish,” is Taylor’s take on Perfidia. What about her baffling dalliance with Lockjaw? She lets out a short laugh. “I mean … that is so toxic. Was it manipulation, or was it just lust, or was it her falling for the bad guy? You never really know with Perfidia,” she says, sounding a little confounded.
Perfidia’s other big, bewildering decision is to walk out on her baby and resume her violent activism, informing a horrified Pat: “I put myself first and reject your lack of originality.” It’s not the easiest move to empathise with, and Taylor, who has two daughters with her basketball player ex-husband Iman Shumpert, struggled to act it out. “It was one of the most difficult scenes for me to film without getting emotional. Just imagining myself walking out on my child, that’s a lot. Me personally, in real life, I wouldn’t do that.”
Yet like Perfidia – who is clearly at a low ebb after giving birth – Taylor also struggled with her mental health in early motherhood. “I’ve been in survival mode before, I’ve dealt with postpartum depression. I know what it feels like to not receive grace and compassion [when you are] categorised as strong. Especially for black women, it’s just like: you’re a strong black woman. What does that even mean? Just because I’m strong doesn’t mean I don’t have moments of weakness, or moments of needing to feel heard and seen.” She commends Anderson “so much for spreading awareness” of postpartum depression.
Unlike the film’s bomb-dispensing, gun-toting vigilante, Taylor has been able to incorporate motherhood into her work. In 2020, she announced her retirement from music, having felt hemmed in by the industry (“thrown in a box where music is everything, you can’t do nothing else – and that’s not me”), only to return this August with a new collection of sultry R&B co-released by her own label. Escape Room, which deals with Taylor’s divorce, ends with a congratulatory message from her nine-year-old (“The world loves you so much / Thank you for coming back to music and back to you”). When she first heard her daughter’s words, Taylor “broke down. Her emotional intelligence is out of this world,” she says, describing her relationship with her children as “the purest form of love”.
Both Taylor’s daughters – her youngest is five – already remind her of herself as a child (“Oh my God, this is what I was doing when I was five, this is what I was doing when I was nine”), but she wants them to keep their options open. “I’m not the parent who is like: ‘I did this so you have to do this too.’ So right now they’re in ballet, they do basketball, they dance, they sing, my youngest is a fashionista. At one point my daughter wanted to play drums. I got her a drum set. At another point she wanted to be a chef; OK, here’s the tools you need. They want to be a janitor? Here’s a broom.”
Taylor, on the other hand, always knew she wanted to be in show business. She describes her younger self as “a character. I was a bossy little thing, I always wanted to direct something.” Yet her experience was limited to singing and dancing around her local neighbourhood, “and Harlem is small”. Things changed abruptly in her mid-teens. “One of my mom’s good friends worked at Universal [Music] and I remember skateboarding back home and I ran into him on the block. He stopped me and was like: ‘Listen, you’re talented, you’re fly, I want you to meet my boss and I want you to sing to him.” When the record executive in question asked who she admired, she said Pharrell Williams. “And it’s so crazy, because the guy happened to be really close with Pharrell. So I met Pharrell and got signed on the spot [to his label] and everything happened from there.”
It was a fairytale beginning – she released her first single, Google Me, at 17 – but Taylor never got swept up in the fantasy of overnight fame. “It was surreal, but I was always in go mode – I never got lost on that. I’m from Harlem, I’m a hustler, I’m a grinder. I’ve always been this little businesswoman.”
Taylor spent the rest of her teens and early 20s as a protege, first for Williams, then Kanye West, whose label she signed to in 2012. She didn’t mind the dynamic. “I was their artist but we built an adult friendship and respect for each other in the fashion space as well. That’s how me and Ye got cool, we were fashion friends,” she says. “Being able to have those men in my life has really shaped me: imagine this 15-year-old girl already having this mind full of creativity and then have the opportunity to be around some of the most creative people in the industry. That’s a cheat sheet right there.”
Yet in some ways her success has been a slow-burn: two decades on from that street-corner collision, it finally feels as if Taylor is taking off. Soon, she’ll star in Ryan Murphy’s hotly anticipated legal drama All’s Fair alongside Kim Kardashian, and in Kevin Hart’s action thriller 72 Hours. She’s also been hand-picked by Dionne Warwick to play her in a biopic. Next year she will direct her first feature film, about a New York dance crew.
“As people we fly a plane,” she says. “And that air may be turbulent. The runway might be too crowded so you got to circle around for a few minutes. You might have an emergency landing. But ultimately the goal is to make it to the destination.” Taylor’s love of a career-based metaphor may know no bounds, but her combination of swagger and conscientiousness is infectious. Musician, actor, dancer, director, air freshener, sponge, pilot: Teyana Taylor can be anything she sets her mind to.
