Taylour Paige doesn’t watch horror. “I am a scaredy-cat,” she deadpans. “If you ask me to watch, the answer is no.” And yet, here she is, starring in one of the year’s most gruesome prestige dramas — HBO’s Welcome to Derry, a prequel to It from the filmmaker duo Barbara and Andy Muschietti.
“When my agents suggested the meeting, I knew it would be foolish to let my fear get in the way,” she says. “We wound up Zooming for two hours, on a Sunday, and Barbara and I even realized we have matching tattoos on our wrists. Hers is in Spanish, mine is in English, but it essentially says ‘Fear not.’ ”
The role came at a moment when Paige needed a win. “They saw something in me, and I got the role, and it was so validating in a time when I really needed to feel that.”
Now 35, Paige broke out as the titular lead of Zola, the A24 film based on the viral Twitter thread about a dancer’s chaotic road trip to Florida. The movie premiered at Sundance in 2020 to buzzy acclaim — only to languish in pandemic limbo for 18 months. Her follow-up, Magazine Dreams, was another Sundance breakout in 2023, but Searchlight dropped it in the wake of star Jonathan Majors’ legal troubles (Briarcliff Entertainment released it in theaters in March).
“Those moments felt like a letdown,” she says. “And then I did the Beverly Hills Cop movie, which I wasn’t really feeling all the way, and I just felt lost within the industry. And I had really high hopes for myself, so my soul was a little tired for a second there.”
Born and raised in Los Angeles, Paige says she’s been performing for as long as she can remember — even if she didn’t always realize it. “As a kid, I dissociated, and used my imagination, as a way to deal with the discomfort of my surroundings at home,” she says. “I was giving every inanimate object around me a personality, and I didn’t realize it at the time but that was acting — it’s projecting feelings just the same.”
She trained as a dancer under famed choreographer Debbie Allen, did a stint as a Laker Girl and studied communications at Loyola Marymount University before landing her first TV role, in 2013, on BET’s Hit the Floor, about a pro basketball dance team. After three seasons, she left to chase more ambitious parts.
Despite the misfires, her career hasn’t been a slog. She won an Independent Spirit Award for Zola, earned acclaim for her role in 2020’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and became a fashion fixture, fronting campaigns for J.Crew and sitting front row at Thom Browne. “I have become so much more myself these last few years,” she says, “and this is the self I want to offer to my work and to the world.”
In the years since Zola, Paige has gone through a breakup with Jesse Williams, married designer Gary “Rivington Starchild” Angulo and become mother to a 5-month-old son. Her new role in Welcome to Derry, as Charlotte Hanlon, taps into something deeper. The show, set during the Jim Crow era, traces the roots of the It story through the lens of racial terror and generational trauma — Charlotte is the grandmother of the young boy featured in the 2017 film.
“I thought of my grandmother when I was creating Charlotte,” Paige says. “She was flawed, as we all are, but she was from the South and I think really could have been an actress, she was that funny and ahead of her time. I have now thought a lot about what dreams died with the women who lived during that time.”
True to form, Paige still hasn’t watched the finished series. Or the two It films. But the experience pushed her to prioritize working with filmmakers she admires — like Boots Riley, the musician and director best known for the surreal 2018 satire Sorry to Bother You. He cast her in his upcoming 2026 sci-fi comedy I Love Boosters.
“Boots was surprised, because it wasn’t a big role, but I told him, ‘I don’t care, I just want to work with you,’ ” she says. “But he wound up writing the role to be a bit bigger based on what he saw me doing. He didn’t realize I could be that funny. I have to toot my own horn and say I freaked it, in the end.”
This story appeared in the Oct. 22 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
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