Teyana Taylor found out that she was going to be in Paul Thomas Anderson’s new film in a rather unexpected way.
“Paul just called my phone randomly,” she remembers. “No agents, no third person, nothing. He was just like, ‘Hey, what’s up?’ And I was like, ‘Who the fuck is this?’ Then this calm voice said, ‘It’s Paul. Paul Thomas Anderson.’ I couldn’t believe that PTA was on my phone. And the rest is history.”
The project, and his reason for calling her out of the blue that day in 2023, was One Battle After Another. In theaters on September 26, the nearly three-hour film is a sprawling drama about a tight-knit revolutionary group called the French 75 who set out to fight the system and liberate the country’s most disenfranchised. Taylor and Leonardo DiCaprio play the star-crossed lovers at its center, though the cast also includes Sean Penn, Benicio del Toro, Regina Hall, Alana Haim, Wood Harris, and newcomer Chase Infiniti, who portrays Taylor and DiCaprio’s daughter, Willa, in a star-making performance.
Taylor plays Perfidia Beverly Hills, a dynamic femme fatale—alternately appealing and rash—who has two men, Bob Ferguson (DiCaprio) and Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw (Penn), the French 75’s sleazy adversary, wrapped around her finger. Her courageous constitution is one of the film’s many highlights; you tend to miss Perfidia when she’s not onscreen.
“This is a woman who we don’t always agree with, but one thing we all can agree on is that she’s a badass and unapologetically herself,” Taylor says.
At the time of our interview, she’s just seen the final version of the film at its Los Angeles premiere. “It was amazing to experience it with a crowd,” she says of watching it at the TCL Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. “I remember watching the dailies while we were shooting and thinking, This is gonna be so dope. So to see it come together and tell a full story is just magical.” One of her favorite scenes to film appears in the trailer, when she’s shown firing off a machine gun while heavily pregnant. After letting off a few bullets, she yells, “Bitch, I felt like Tony Montana!”
When Taylor delivered that line, which she improvised, she had a feeling that it was going to be a standout scene. “I knew that that was gonna look iconic,” she says.
Playing a mother also came quite naturally to Taylor, who has two daughters with her ex-husband, the former NBA player Iman Shumpert. In the film, after Perfidia gives birth to Willa, her postpartum depression leads her to make a life-altering decision. “It was dope to bring Perfidia to life because I’ve been in that space before,” Taylor reveals. “I’ve been in survival mode. I knew what that looked like. I’m a mom of two, so I can sympathize. I love that Paul was able to bring awareness to a woman’s mental health after giving birth. Everybody handles things differently. The way Perfidia handled it may not be the way that I would have handled it in real life, but who are you to tell a woman how to handle her postpartum depression?”
But for all the weight that Taylor had to bear onscreen, she made sure to make time for joy when the cameras stopped rolling. For one thing, she brought to set her chef, who treated the cast and crew to several helpings of rasta pasta. Ever the extrovert, she was also happy to take on the role of social coordinator. “I was always like, ‘Let’s do something! Let’s go!’ I’m the class clown—always joking, always playing. I love to make everybody laugh, even if that laugh only lasts for five seconds. It feels good knowing that I played a part in that.”
One night, while they were filming in California, she took everyone out to a basketball game. “We all sat courtside at a Sacramento Kings game,” she says. Taylor had lived in the city when Shumpert played for the team. “It felt like home to me, and I loved being able to take the cast out and vibe with everybody.”
When she was just breaking into the industry, Taylor, who is originally from Harlem, didn’t tend to hang out with castmates after work like she does now. She was a teenager when she starred in her first film, 2010’s Stomp the Yard: Homecoming. “When I first got into the game, I was still in school,” she recalls. “I still had a curfew.” In the years since her debut, she’s gone on to star in Tyler Perry’s Madea’s Big Happy Family, the drama Brotherly Love, and the 2023 indie A Thousand and One, which earned her critical acclaim and a Critics Choice Award.
Along the way, she’s also established a music career; her fourth studio album, Escape Room, was released in August. The project—which features interludes from Black Hollywood legends like Regina King, Taraji P. Henson, and Kerry Washington—details how Taylor has navigated love and heartbreak after her divorce.
Her fans’ emotional response to the work has genuinely touched her. “I love that the album is healing to people,” she says. “That means the world to me, and that’s what it’s always about. I don’t care about a sale. I don’t care about a stream. I care about how I can help change someone’s life or perspective. I love that my vulnerability is something that women can relate to. I’ve dealt with all of the things that any other girl has been through. I’m just a girl, and I’m so happy that all the women get to just be a girl with me. That’s why it’s so special.”
The pendulum will soon swing back to the screen, though, as she’s set to star in a slew of upcoming projects, including Ryan Murphy’s new series All’s Fair with Kim Kardashian and Sarah Paulson; Netflix’s The Rip starring Ben Affleck and Matt Damon; and a forthcoming musical biopic in which she’ll play Dionne Warwick (who handpicked Taylor for the role). She’s also set to make her directorial debut with the film Get Lite, which will star Storm Reid.
Taylor’s journey to this moment in her career has been long but well worth it. “I went from receiving a lot of nos to receiving so many yeses, and that’s the part that makes me emotional,” she says. “It’s like, damn, I finally feel seen, heard, appreciated in my craft. I’ve been doing this for a very long time, and everything ain’t always rolled out so perfectly for me. But now I’m getting everything I’ve ever prayed for. My prayers are being answered, and I don’t take that lightly. I don’t let that get lost on me.”
When asked how she navigates her increasingly busy schedule, she slightly scoffs at the question. “I don’t have a choice but to balance it,” she says. “I wanted this. You don’t get to receive all your blessings then complain about them.”