‘I’m a hustler, a grinder’: Teyana Taylor on music, motherhood and One Battle After Another | Movies

Teyana Taylor is – as she usually says to interviewers – the leisure equal of “a Glade plug-in” air freshener: put her in “any socket” and she’s going to make “each room odor good”. And, at 34, she has the CV to show it. After kicking off her profession at 15 as a choreographer for Beyoncé (she later showcased her personal strikes to thousands and thousands within the headline-grabbing video for Kanye West’s 2016 single Fade), the New York native started making her personal critically acclaimed, cutting-edge R&B. She has additionally acted in a slew of films and TV exhibits – together with an award-winning flip as a mom who kidnaps her son from the care system in 2023’s A Thousand and One – and labored as a artistic director for manufacturers and a number of different musicians.However Taylor additionally likens herself to a different family merchandise. “I’m a sponge,” she says. “I’m by no means above being a scholar.” This was very true on the set of her newest venture, Paul Thomas Anderson’s vigilante group caper One Battle After One other. Observing castmates together with Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn and Benicio del Toro – plus the director himself (to many, the best of his technology) – turned her into “SpongeBob SquarePants. I get to have my pocket book and take all these notes and soak all the things in.”Having seen her in motion because the movie’s swaggering, libidinous revolutionary Perfidia Beverly Hills, this can be very troublesome to think about Taylor hunched within the nook between takes, scribbling down performing ideas. On display, she is completely cocksure, whether or not demanding fellow vigilante Ghetto Pat (DiCaprio) have intercourse along with her on a automobile bonnet within the two minutes earlier than the bomb they’ve simply planted explodes, instructing Penn’s Colonel Lockjaw at gunpoint to get an erection, or firing off rounds with a machine gun resting on her closely pregnant abdomen earlier than proclaiming: “Bitch! I felt like Tony Montana!”That priceless line was Taylor’s personal. Anderson, she says, would regularly ask her to “try this factor that you just do”, which meant “cease worrying about your strains” and “add my further little spice to it”. Anderson had been impressed by her efficiency in A Thousand and One, she says. He ran the thought of casting her by DiCaprio, “figuring out that me and Leo is cool” (the pair turned buddies after assembly just a few years in the past at Diana Ross’s birthday celebration). The punt paid off: the movie’s first act depends virtually completely on Taylor’s skill to channel an alarming maelstrom of lust, fury, recklessness and righteousness in a crop prime and cargo pants. She pulls it off with aplomb.Once we communicate, Taylor is in her lodge room in LA; One Battle After One other had its premiere within the metropolis a few days earlier, producing on the spot Oscar buzz. Steven Spielberg describing it as “insane” and “actually unbelievable” definitely helped. Taylor is thrilled: “Which means he is aware of who I’m, he is aware of what I appear like!” she says with hushed disbelief.Quickly, many extra will know. One Battle After One other is prone to be one of many season’s greatest blockbusters – the automobile chases alone are well worth the value of admission – however as you’d anticipate from Anderson, whose eclectic oeuvre consists of Boogie Nights, Punch-Drunk Love, There Will Be Blood and Phantom Thread, that is under no circumstances normal Hollywood fare. Loosely based mostly on Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland, it combines political satire, stoner comedy, social realism and slick heist-film styling to chronicle the actions of the French 75, a fictional revolutionary gang who liberate immigration camps and rob banks for funds, earlier than fast-forwarding 16 years to the second when Perfidia’s daughter is kidnapped.‘I used to be at all times in go mode’ … Taylor performing in 2021. {Photograph}: Scott Dudelson/Getty ImagesAs a protagonist, Perfidia is morally ambivalent, to place it mildly (the clue’s within the identify), and it’s her relationship with Penn’s brutal but pathetic wannabe white supremacist that triggers the motion. “I feel she’s badass, I feel she’s advanced, I feel she’s egocentric,” is Taylor’s tackle Perfidia. What about her baffling dalliance with Lockjaw? She lets out a brief snigger. “I imply … that’s so poisonous. Was it manipulation, or was it simply lust, or was it her falling for the unhealthy man? You by no means actually know with Perfidia,” she says, sounding slightly confounded.Perfidia’s different huge, bewildering choice is to stroll out on her child and resume her violent activism, informing a horrified Pat: “I put myself first and reject your lack of originality.” It’s not the best transfer to empathise with, and Taylor, who has two daughters along with her basketball participant ex-husband Iman Shumpert, struggled to behave it out. “It was one of the troublesome scenes for me to movie with out getting emotional. Simply imagining myself strolling out on my baby, that’s lots. Me personally, in actual life, I wouldn’t try this.”But like Perfidia – who’s clearly at a low ebb after giving delivery – Taylor additionally struggled along with her psychological well being in early motherhood. “I’ve been in survival mode earlier than, I’ve handled postpartum melancholy. I do know what it feels wish to not obtain grace and compassion [when you are] categorised as robust. Particularly for black girls, it’s identical to: you’re a powerful black lady. What does that even imply? Simply because I’m robust doesn’t imply I don’t have moments of weak spot, or moments of needing to really feel heard and seen.” She commends Anderson “a lot for spreading consciousness” of postpartum melancholy.‘I’ve been in survival mode earlier than’ … Taylor and Leonardo DiCaprio in One Battle After One other. {Photograph}: Courtesy Warner Bros PicturesUnlike the movie’s bomb-dispensing, gun-toting vigilante, Taylor has been capable of incorporate motherhood into her work. In 2020, she introduced her retirement from music, having felt hemmed in by the trade (“thrown in a field the place music is all the things, you’ll be able to’t do nothing else – and that’s not me”), solely to return this August with a brand new assortment of sultry R&B co-released by her personal label. Escape Room, which offers with Taylor’s divorce, ends with a congratulatory message from her nine-year-old (“The world loves you a lot / Thanks for coming again to music and again to you”). When she first heard her daughter’s phrases, Taylor “broke down. Her emotional intelligence is out of this world,” she says, describing her relationship along with her youngsters as “the purest type of love”.Each Taylor’s daughters – her youngest is 5 – already remind her of herself as a toddler (“Oh my God, that is what I used to be doing once I was 5, that is what I used to be doing once I was 9”), however she needs them to maintain their choices open. “I’m not the guardian who’s like: ‘I did this so it’s a must to do that too.’ So proper now they’re in ballet, they do basketball, they dance, they sing, my youngest is a fashionista. At one level my daughter needed to play drums. I received her a drum set. At one other level she needed to be a chef; OK, right here’s the instruments you want. They wish to be a janitor? Right here’s a brush.”‘As a 15-year-old, I had the chance to be round among the most artistic folks within the trade’ … Taylor on the Met Gala in 2025. {Photograph}: Angela Weiss/AFP/Getty ImagesTaylor, then again, at all times knew she needed to be in present enterprise. She describes her youthful self as “a personality. I used to be a bossy little factor, I at all times needed to direct one thing.” But her expertise was restricted to singing and dancing round her native neighbourhood, “and Harlem is small”. Issues modified abruptly in her mid-teens. “Certainly one of my mother’s good associates labored at Common [Music] and I keep in mind skateboarding again dwelling and I bumped into him on the block. He stopped me and was like: ‘Hear, you’re proficient, you’re fly, I would like you to satisfy my boss and I would like you to sing to him.” When the document govt in query requested who she admired, she stated Pharrell Williams. “And it’s so loopy, as a result of the man occurred to be actually shut with Pharrell. So I met Pharrell and received signed on the spot [to his label] and all the things occurred from there.”It was a fairytale starting – she launched her first single, Google Me, at 17 – however Taylor by no means received swept up within the fantasy of in a single day fame. “It was surreal, however I used to be at all times in go mode – I by no means received misplaced on that. I’m from Harlem, I’m a hustler, I’m a grinder. I’ve at all times been this little businesswoman.”Taylor spent the remainder of her teenagers and early 20s as a protege, first for Williams, then Kanye West, whose label she signed to in 2012. She didn’t thoughts the dynamic. “I used to be their artist however we constructed an grownup friendship and respect for one another within the trend area as nicely. That’s how me and Ye received cool, we had been trend associates,” she says. “Having the ability to have these males in my life has actually formed me: think about this 15-year-old woman already having this thoughts stuffed with creativity after which have the chance to be round among the most artistic folks within the trade. That’s a cheat sheet proper there.”But in some methods her success has been a slow-burn: 20 years on from that street-corner collision, it lastly feels as if Taylor is taking off. Quickly, she’ll star in Ryan Murphy’s hotly anticipated authorized drama All’s Honest alongside Kim Kardashian, and in Kevin Hart’s motion thriller 72 Hours. She’s additionally been hand-picked by Dionne Warwick to play her in a biopic. Subsequent yr she’s going to direct her first characteristic movie, a couple of New York dance crew.“As folks we fly a airplane,” she says. “And that air could also be turbulent. The runway may be too crowded so you bought to circle round for a couple of minutes. You may need an emergency touchdown. However finally the objective is to make it to the vacation spot.” Taylor’s love of a career-based metaphor might know no bounds, however her mixture of swagger and conscientiousness is infectious. Musician, actor, dancer, director, air freshener, sponge, pilot: Teyana Taylor might be something she units her thoughts to. One Battle After One other is launched on 25 September in Australia, and on 26 September within the UK and US