Teyana Taylor Has Arrived: The Veteran Star on Her Breakout Year

The preternaturally quotable actor, musician, choreographer, and 2026 Golden Globe winner considers her role in Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another “the fucking ultimate master class.”

BY LINDSEY UNDERWOOD,

PHOTOGRAPHY BY ETHAN JAMES GREEN,

FASHION EDITOR DARA ALLEN

Teyana Taylor is an actor, a singer, a choreographer, a director, and perhaps surprisingly, a hugger.

She comes off with a certain fierce confidence—almost intimidating with the angularity of her face, the muscularity of her shape, and the intensity of her gaze. It’s not something she has always been able to shed. It seems like when people look at her, they are just looking at her.

That’s not always what she’s after. So before our lunch at Red Rooster Harlem on Lenox Avenue, Taylor’s old stomping grounds, she greets the restaurant staff, and me, each with an embrace before ordering a pineapple margarita, cornbread, mac and greens, and chicken and waffles (wings only, please). To her, the spot felt like home: “I’m a Harlem girl for real, for real.” Taylor grew up just blocks away, but now we’re sitting in a private room at the celebrity chef Marcus Samuelsson’s restaurant, where they are playing her music to welcome her back.

“Soon we’re going to have your menu item on there,” our server tells Taylor. The restaurant already has a drink named for her: the Rose in Harlem, made with “vodka, floral liquor, lychee, and lemon juice.” What will her dish be? “Whatever she decides,” he says.

These days it’s almost like you can’t get away from Taylor. She’s a favorite for an Oscar nomination for her role in One Battle After Another, starring alongside Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, and Benicio Del Toro. She plays a cop in The Rip, the upcoming crime thriller with Ben Affleck and Matt Damon. And she did a TV show too, Ryan Murphy’s All’s Fair with Kim Kardashian, Glenn Close, Sarah Paulson, Naomi Watts, and Niecy Nash-Betts. Or maybe I should say they all did these projects with Taylor, whose star seems to be reaching new heights after years of persistence in the entertainment industry.

By any standard measure, Taylor has been poised for this time in the spotlight for a while. Her career began at just 15 years old, when she worked on Beyoncé’s “Ring the Alarm” video, teaching the singer how to do the chicken noodle soup dance. “I was one of them busybody kids,” Taylor, 35, says. “I did everything. I was in a choir and had my own Bible study class. I was running track. I was choreographing.” A few years later she would release her debut single, “Google Me”—a nice foreshadowing of her future name recognition—and sign with labels like Pharrell Williams’s Star Trak Entertainment, and eventually Kanye West’s G.O.O.D. Music and Def Jam. Even as a teen and a young woman, it seemed like Taylor could not stop moving. She went on to release four studio albums, a handful of mixtapes, and more than a dozen singles in a span of 10-plus years.

Still, when she wasn’t getting the support she wanted from Def Jam five years ago, she announced she would retire from music to focus on her other interests. “Maybe it’s the Sag in me,” she says, referring to her astrological sign, Sagittarius. “We’re gonna pivot. We’re going to do whatever we put our hearts to. And I never had one thing. I was the dreamer that wanted to make my dreams a reality.”

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