Teyana Taylor is a singer, songwriter, choreographer, actor and director who is also currently in culinary school and designs graphic T-shirts and merchandise. And she doesn’t just dabble in these fields — she excels. So, it begs the question: is there anything she’s bad at? “I hate being cold,” Taylor reveals. “The cold is going to conquer me every single time. I can’t even fake it. If I had to audition for a winter movie — nope.”
Fortunately, the temperatures should be balmy in January when she receives the Creative Impact in Breakthrough Performance Award at a special brunch Jan. 4 at the Palm Springs International Film Awards for her role in Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another.” She plays Perfidia Beverly Hills, a member of a resistance group who gives birth to — then abandons — her daughter, Willa. Sixteen years later, Willa finds herself at the center of a massive conspiracy that brings some of her mother’s old allies out of hiding. And Taylor is a force — driven, determined, sexy, smart. She more than holds her own opposite Oscar-winners Leonardo DiCaprio and Sean Penn.
The two worked together to build the role. That included Perfidia’s battle with postpartum depression, something the mother of two understands personally. In fact, she improvised several lines about “the feeling of not feeling seen and not feeling beautiful, not feeling heard and just not being able for the baby to latch on.” She was grateful Anderson chose to include it. “I feel like it’s a topic that’s not spoken about enough. I was anxious and excited to start getting into those layers.”
Taylor previously earned raves for her performance in the 2023 Sundance winner “A Thousand and One,” where she played another complicated mother who kidnaps her own child out of foster care. She has no qualms about taking on a role that some audience members might judge.
“[Perfidia] makes decisions that we may not all agree with, but we can all agree on the fact that she’s unapologetically herself and stands 10 toes down on a lot of things that we probably wouldn’t have been able to do at one point,” she notes. “Especially as a woman, we’re told we’re too confident, we got to tone it down. Here we see this woman. It’s like ‘No, you won’t quiet me. You won’t set me down. I won’t play house with you.’”
The character is so fascinating and complex, Taylor wouldn’t hesitate to play her again. Noting that Perfidia disappears from the film for 16 years only to be heard from in a letter at the end, she would love to know more about her life. So she’s open to a sequel or a companion piece — suggest the “Perfidia Beverly Hills Expanded Universe,” and she says to tell Anderson: “He could have pulled a ‘Wicked!’ He could have shot all of it and broken it in two because it’s so much story.” She even suggests making a spinoff utilizing footage that didn’t make the final cut and new scenes. “You could literally merge the other pieces, get a few new scenes with me — and then drop it, drop it like a mixtape!”
variety.com
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