One Battle After Another, All’s Fair, Career

Teyana Taylor appreciates a spectacle. She’s made this clear since her public debut: a 2007 episode of My Super Sweet 16, MTV’s formative millennial text about lavish high school parties. Hers was a Harlem rager that kicked off with the birthday girl, posing inside a Teyana-size Barbie box, being wheeled in by a quartet of shirtless men.

She performed her own choreography in a custom Heatherette tutu. Pharrell Williams was there. And, yes, she got a car. (Taylor, one of the more polite children ever featured on the series, was much more psyched about a BMX bike from her mother.) It’s a memory she cherishes, albeit one that sometimes inspires a frustrating narrative.

“I want to clear this up,” says Taylor. “I’ve seen people saying I’m a … what’s it called? A nee-po baby? Nepo baby! I’ve seen all types of stuff, like I had this rich Chinese dad or a producer dad. I was living on 144th and Seventh Avenue, and my single mom was working her ass off in corporate America to provide for me. She wanted me to have a nice party!”

Self-made status always mattered to Taylor, but it seems especially important to her today. We’re speaking in a hotel suite above the Sunset Strip, where she’s coming down from the global press tour for Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another before hitting the road again to push her new Hulu series. Taylor’s résumé is getting thicker by the day, but it’s her lauded performance as live-wire revolutionary Perfidia Beverly Hills in Anderson’s latest feature that’s signaled a shift in her career — and given her early frontrunner status in the Oscar supporting actress race.

“You can see my patience being in this game since I was 15, doing a little bit of everything,” says Taylor, who has released four studio albums, modeled, acted alongside Eddie Murphy, choreographed for Beyoncé, raised eyebrows and pulses at multiple Met Galas and even enjoyed a stint as a reality TV star. “This moment hits a lot harder than it would’ve if everything had gone my way when I wanted it to.”

Her friends have been waiting for everybody else to figure out what they’ve long known. “She’s just that girl,” says Taraji P. Henson. “They always tell you in this business that you’ve got to choose a lane, that nobody’s good at everything. Well, guess who is?”

It appears the business may have caught up to Taylor. One Battle After Another is a prelude to a blitz of work — projects she’s developed on her own and features she’s filmed with Ben Affleck, Matt Damon and Kevin Hart.

“She’s doing the filmmakers the favor,” Anderson says, “not the other way round.”

If there’s any drawback to leveling up, Taylor says, it’s about maintaining the boundaries she’s established for herself and the two daughters she shares with former husband and retired NBA player Iman Shumpert. She relishes most of this attention — “These compliments are a beautiful thing, and I’ll take the constructive criticism, too!” — but she’s been burned by clickbait about past issues with the recording industry, a very public divorce and her current relationship status. She knows that a broader spotlight makes that part of the job challenging to avoid.

She also knows how to seize and savor one of those rare junctures in a career where everything seems to finally fall into place. “There’s no such thing as complaining about answered prayers,” she tells me. “Do you know how dope it is to be shown this much love from people who don’t know you from a can of paint?”

***

The night after we meet, Taylor attends the Los Angeles premiere for Kim Kardashian and Ryan Murphy’s All’s Fair. She stars in the legal soap alongside one of the most unlikely and impressive TV ensembles in recent memory: Glenn Close, Niecy Nash, Sarah Paulson, Naomi Watts and Kardashian herself. But at the Chateau Marmont afterparty, Taylor isn’t with the other actors. She’s in the lobby bar, holding court with a group of Golden Globes voters.

This is not her first experience with abrupt upticks in attention, and it shows. There have been three key moments over the years, My Super Sweet 16 included, where it almost seemed like she materialized out of nowhere.

Barely a teenager, the self-described fly girl was skateboarding around Harlem and dancing with a group of girlfriends. They shared an obsession with N.E.R.D., the erstwhile rock/hip-hop act started by Pharrell and Chad Hugo. “I was that kid that was too grown,” she says. “Not in a fresh way. I wasn’t fast, but I would choreograph for different dance teams in Harlem. I was hood famous.”

This aptitude for song and dance, combined with some friend-of-a-friend magic, was enough to get Taylor an audience with two people who would change her life. Word of her affinity for N.E.R.D. got her in the room and under contract with Pharrell. Simultaneously, Beyoncé was looking for somebody to teach her one of the first documented viral dances. Taylor parlayed the arranged Chicken Noodle Soup tutorial into a choreography credit on the singer’s “Ring the Alarm” video.

That’s one way to get your birthday party on MTV.

“When I got signed, I got an advance,” explains Taylor. “So between my mom, Pharrell and the label, they put that party together. It was my welcome gift. And it was probably the most modest episode that show ever had.”

Taylor’s next big leap didn’t come from her own music but from Kanye West’s. By 2016, she’d moved from Pharrell’s Star Trak to West’s GOOD Music and enlisted to star in the video for his track “Fade.” Premiering during that year’s VMAs, the music video is three minutes and 40 seconds of Taylor dancing in a sports bra, thong and kneepads — putting Jennifer Beals’ Flashdance body double to shame. This literal exposure, says Taylor, reduced her to “just a hot body” to some. But such a label ignores her athleticism and control over that body. It earned her the best choreography award at the 2017 ceremony.

For the purposes of her current scenario, however, nothing set Taylor’s table better than the 2023 indie A Thousand and One. Her music career was on hold to pursue acting more seriously, and director A.V. Rockwell cast her as the lead of her feature debut after auditioning more than 500 other actresses.

“Even if Hollywood didn’t know her as well, she was already in the public eye,” says Rockwell. “So I really wanted to know she could disappear into the role and not be concerned about her image.”

By this point a fixture at fashion weeks on both sides of the Atlantic, Taylor’s stripped-down take on a formerly incarcerated single mother who kidnaps her son from the foster care system helped earn the film the grand jury prize at Sundance. She received multiple accolades, including nominations for best lead performance at the Gotham Awards and Independent Spirit Awards. “I didn’t want anybody being like, ‘Did she just get lucky with this one?’ ” says Taylor, immediately eager for a follow-up. “I pray for those opportunities to show what I can do, but it’s because I want to keep at it.”

Without that opportunity, she might not have booked One Battle After Another. Taylor anchors the first 40 minutes of the film. It’s a prologue of sorts before the narrative jumps in time to focus on Leonardo DiCaprio’s “Ghetto Pat” and Chase Infiniti, who plays their daughter. Taylor squeezes as much as she can out of her overture, her character firing a semiautomatic while fully pregnant in one of the film’s most arresting images before reckoning with postpartum depression and then making some very questionable decisions in that vulnerable state.

“When we did our costume fittings and camera tests, a type of metamorphosis happened,” says Anderson. “It’s the dancer energy that she brings. When the costume comes on and the situation is authentic, she really lights up and starts to go. Early on, we shot her running at full speed at sundown. I think it’s when the crew realized we were working with someone special who was going to thrill us.”

One Battle After Another holds the top ranking of any 2025 release on review aggregator Metacritic, the more discerning version of Rotten Tomatoes, and its detractors are few. Critiques from the American right, which lament the film’s timely depictions of a police state, immigrant internment camps and leftist revolt, read like ChatGPT essays programmed to write in the voice of Karen. But some more thoughtful objections — see journalist Van Lathan’s October appearance on The Ringer podcast The Big Picture — take issue with the ways in which Perfidia is sexualized by two white men, DiCaprio and Sean Penn’s characters, the latter a neo-Nazi.

Taylor hasn’t dug into this particular take, but she’s still eager to weigh in when I bring it up.

“Is that not what Black women go through?”

She adds: “We are fetishized, especially by creepy motherfuckers. And we are, unfortunately, the least protected people. Showing what Black women go through, that’s a hard reality to accept. And this movie should spark debate, I always knew it would, because sometimes you just got to shake the table.”

***

After the Los Angeles premiere, there are events for All’s Fair in Paris, London and New York — each one documented exhaustively on social media, with Taylor and company all hamming it up in a parade of over-the-top outfits. (Kris Jenner also is an executive producer, so would you expect anything less?)

The tour was surprisingly the first occasion that Paulson, who didn’t cross paths with Taylor on set, got to spend some concentrated time with Taylor in person. “There’s a real sense of play with her,” says Paulson. “We’ve just been clowning each other at photo calls because we both have the same side of our face that we prefer be photographed. That means we can’t look at each other, but at the same time, I’m bearing witness to someone who’s about to lift off into the stratosphere.”

Taylor’s been overdue for a good time. Worn out by years of her recording career never going the way she wanted it to, she announced her retirement from music in 2020 — “Everywhere I went, I was treated with the utmost respect,” she explains, “but we know how labels are, and sometimes the machines just don’t know what to do with you” — and then, in 2023, she filed for divorce from Shumpert, initially citing “cruel treatment.” The public back-and-forth stretched well past the settlement, and Taylor admits that her own words — she’s had a few epic Instagram Lives — occasionally prolonged the news cycle.

This change in subject marks the only time in her company when Taylor, who displays a seemingly endless capacity for animation and enthusiasm, loses steam. She starts to tear up. Not about the divorce. No, she appears quite over that. “It’s about learning to not bite the bait,” she says. “When people know that you’re sensitive to something, you will get poked and poked and poked and poked. I want to be careful with my words because it seems like every time I say something, it’s always misconstrued.”

Catharsis came from, of all places, a return to music. Her very brief retirement ended in August with Escape Room. An album and short film, it serves as an emotional exorcism of a 10-year relationship and a celebration of what followed. It also happens to include nine narrative interstitials read by the likes of Issa Rae, Kerry Washington and Nash — as well as Paulson and Henson.

The spoken-word vignettes progress from blackout rage to horny liberation before ultimately landing on sweet reassurance. Daughters Rue Rose, 5, and Junie, 9, close out the album by thanking their mother for making it to the other side of her ordeal.

“It was excruciating to watch somebody you really care about go through that in the public eye,” says Henson. “For her to take control of her narrative like this, that’s power. She leaves it all on the wax.”

Taylor’s primary co-star in the visual album, which she directed, is Aaron Pierre, the 31-year-old English actor (Rebel Ridge, the upcoming HBO series Lanterns) with whom she’s been publicly linked since February. Earlier in the year, speculation about their romance would get a colorful no comment — “I am begging y’all to let me get my back blown out in peace,” she said in one Instagram — but she recently posted a video of herself gyrating against a video billboard of his BOSS campaign in a London store.

I ask how she got from one extreme to the other.

“What’s funny is that he was the one that filmed me twerking in front of that thing,” she says, before declining to put a label on the relationship. “That’s my apple pie, and we are each other’s safe space. If that’s something that I decide to say, then it’s going to be something that we say together.”

***

Taylor won’t follow the All’s Fair launch tour to its final stop in Brazil. She’ll head to Atlanta, instead. That’s home, where she plans to indulge her daughters’ latest obsession with at least one trip to Sephora, turn off her phone over Thanksgiving and hopefully take a few classes. She recently enrolled in culinary school, focusing on pastry, and she doesn’t find the online courses as satisfying as being in the kitchen.

“I’m still wondering, ‘How do I navigate this?’ ” she says, gesturing to the invisible expectations of her time that have never been this demanding. “I respect every set I’m on. I respect the people that I work with. And I ask for respect of my time off. I need to be with my babies.”

Come December, time off will be harder to come by. Ignoring the potential obligations of the inevitable awards run for One Battle After Another, her own feature directorial debut (Paramount’s Get Lite, starring Storm Reid) is expected to start filming in the spring. There’s also a long-gestating Dionne Warwick biopic — for which Warwick herself tapped Taylor to star — that’s said to be near financing. Already in the can is a Kevin Hart comedy. But first, there’s The Rip. The Miami crime thriller, which reunites Affleck and Matt Damon on camera and as producers under their Artists Equity banner, arrives Jan. 16 on Netflix, with Taylor, Steven Yeun and Catalina Sandino Moreno rounding out the cast.

“She’s not somebody who necessarily comes from the church of worshipful actors,” says Affleck. In other words, Teyana Taylor is unfazed: “She left our movie with everyone a hell of a lot more impressed with her than I think she was with everybody else.”

Affleck laughs and waits a beat.

“That quality is pretty valuable for where she finds herself. It helps keep your head on your shoulders,” he adds. “But if you spend any time with Teyana, you know she doesn’t need any help with that.”

Wherever her head’s at, Taylor might be more impressed with everyone than she has let on. As I’m rattling off some of the marquee names she shares billing with this year and next, she stops me before I can make it to the third call sheet.

“Imagine having these legends for teachers,” says Taylor. “You think I’m about to fall asleep in class? No. I’m going to open that notebook, pen to pad. I’m here to be a sponge. Even when I’m teaching, I’m a student. And I’m a straight-A student.”

This story appeared in the Nov. 5 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.