From Beyoncé choreographer to Oscar frontrunner: The meteoric rise of Teyana Taylor

Everywhere you look this awards season, Teyana Taylor is there. Not content with winning her first Golden Globe last weekend for her scene-stealing performance in Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, the actor and singer is also up for her first Grammy for recent R&B album, Escape Room, and is heavily tipped to lead the Oscar nominations for Best Supporting Actress when they’re announced next Thursday.

For anyone who has witnessed Taylor’s wildly charismatic turn as One Battle After Another’s Perfidia Beverly Hills, encapsulated by the indelible image of her relentlessly letting off a machine gun while heavily pregnant, the praise for her acting will come as no surprise. She pops off the screen as if she’s operating in an extra dimension, entrancing audiences just as she leaves both Leonardo DiCaprio’s stoned revolutionary Bob and Sean Penn’s perverse white supremacist Colonel Lockjaw trailing in her wake.

While some critics have claimed that her character plays into sexualized stereotypes that fetishise Black women, Taylor has made the case that the portrayal is true to life. “Is that not what Black women go through?” she asked The Hollywood Reporter rhetorically, adding: “We are fetishised, especially by creepy motherf***ers. And we are, unfortunately, the least protected people. Showing what Black women go through, that’s a hard reality to accept.”

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In a recent interview with Vanity Fair, Taylor went on to argue that her character uses her sexuality as just another weapon in her arsenal, especially when faced with the snivelling Lockjaw (played by Sean Penn), saying: “Perfidia kind of dived into the, ‘Oh, you think I’m hot? All right, bet. Cool if I get to still do what I’m doing, all I gotta do is show you a little titty or something.’”

It’s hard to imagine anyone else but Taylor inhabiting a role like Perfidia. Her star-making performance makes use of the former backing dancer’s coiled physicality and her savage wit, and has deservedly launched her into the highest echelons of the acting world. Her meteoric overnight success, however, has been a long time coming. At 35, she’s already been in the business for two decades.

Taylor was born on 10 December 1990, in Harlem, the vibrant Manhattan neighbourhood that has produced legends of entertainment like Angela Bassett and Sidney Poitier. Raised by her mother, Nikki, Taylor began performing at a young age and by nine was singing in local competitions. “I was one of them busybody kids,” Taylor told Vanity Fair. “I did everything. I was in a choir and had my own Bible study class. I was running track. I was choreographing.”

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It was the latter talent that first had her rubbing shoulders with pop royalty. When Beyoncé was shooting the video for her single “Ring The Alarm” in New York in 2006, she decided she wanted to learn a then-viral Harlem dance routine known as the “Chicken Noodle Soup” and recruited 15-year-old Taylor to teach it to her. “I was one of the faces of the Chicken Noodle Soup,” Taylor explained on LeBron James’ podcast. “I got the call and I literally jumped up. I had my skateboard with me, and went in like: ‘Hey everybody!’ [Beyoncé] was like: ‘She’s a star.’”

Beyoncé saw Taylor’s rise coming. The pop icon urged her husband Jay-Z to cast the teenager as a dancer in his “Blue Magic” video in 2007, around the same time Taylor signed a record deal with Pharrell Williams’s label Star Trak Entertainment Pharrell also made an appearance at Taylor’s 16th birthday, an extravagant Harlem bash that saw her arrive inside an oversized Barbie box before leading an elaborate group dance routine.

The party featured in an episode of MTV’s My Super Sweet 16, a reality show that became notorious for featuring spoilt rich kids complaining they hadn’t received as many ponies as they expected. Taylor’s episode, which was bankrolled by Pharrell’s label, was different. “I remember watching this episode as a kid,” one YouTube commenter recalled. “Teyana was one of the only kids to not be super bratty.”

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At 17, Taylor released her debut single “Google Me,” followed by the mixtape From a Planet Called Harlem. Her music initially struggled to break through, but she was catapulted to mainstream attention a couple of years later when she featured on two songs on Kanye West’s acclaimed 2010 magnum opus My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.

Still only 19, Taylor later claimed she’d essentially hustled her way onto the record after West brought her to the studio to discuss fashion. “Even though the invite really was to check out clothes, I had told myself I was going to get on that album – whether he knew or not,” she told Complex in 2012. “He started playing his album and I start humming and doing some little runs to what I’m hearing ... I knew what I was doing!”

West added her voice to the songs “Hell of a Life” and “Dark Fantasy,” with Taylor saying of the latter: “At the time it was pretty empty, just verses. He put me in another room by myself and said, ‘Go.’ I came back with a whole intro and chorus.”

Taylor continued to collaborate with West for many years after that, with the rapper signing her to his G.O.O.D. Music label and producing her 2018 album K.T.S.E. (Keep That Same Energy). Speaking about West’s fall from grace after his antisemitic rants and many other controversies, Taylor told Vanity Fair she still considers him family. “I don’t have to agree with everything that he do or say, but I’m not going to, like, abandon him and be like, ‘Yeah, eff that motherf***er,’” she said. “My brothers do s*** that I don’t agree with ... I don’t get into none of that.”

In 2020, Taylor announced in an Instagram post that she was stepping away from the music industry to concentrate on acting. She had a small part as the daughter of Wesley Snipes’ General Izzi in comedy sequel Coming 2 America the following year, but it was her lead role in 2023 family drama A Thousand and One that caught the eye of directors everywhere. Cast as Inez, a woman who kidnaps a six-year-old boy from foster care, Taylor proved herself to be a deep and compelling leading actor of significant talent.

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It was drama in her own personal life that brought Taylor back to music. In 2023, she split with former NBA player Iman Shumpert, her husband of seven years and the father of her two daughters, 10-year-old Junie and five-year-old Rue. In the wake of their breakup, she wrote and recorded a new album, Escape Room, which earned her the best reviews of her career along with a Grammy nomination for Best R&B Album. She released it along with a short film featuring her then-boyfriend, Mufasa star Aaron Pierre, telling Variety it was inspired by “that journey we all take through the shadows of heartbreak.”

Whether she’ll be able to keep balancing music with her burgeoning acting career remains to be seen. Certainly, Hollywood plans to keep her busy. This month, she stars as a detective alongside Ben Affleck and Matt Damon in the Netflix action movie The Rip, after which she’ll be seen in the upcoming Kevin Hart comedy 72 Hours.

She also had a key role in the critically derided but commercially successful legal drama All’s Fair, starring alongside West’s former partner Kim Kardashian, and will return for the show’s second season. Before then, on 24 January, Taylor will head home to New York to host Saturday Night Live for the first time.

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If that sounds like a daunting schedule, consider that on top of all that, Taylor is also currently enrolled as a student at the prestigious Auguste Escoffier School of Culinary Arts. That’s proof of a formidable work ethic, even if she did reveal on the Globes red carpet that she’d had to ask the chef instructing her for an extension on her latest project. She assured her interviewer that she wouldn’t let the deafening awards season buzz distract her from her cooking. “I’m a straight-A student,” she told E! News, “And I want to keep it that way.”

Right now, Taylor seems to be scoring straight As wherever she puts her attention. After she won her Golden Globe, she delivered an endearing speech that opened with a shout-out to her daughters. “My babies are upstairs watching!” she exclaimed. “Y’all better be off those damn phones and watching me right now!”

Globes wins have historically been good indicators of Oscars success, and coupled with the way Taylor charmed the audience in the room, many industry insiders are convinced the Academy Award is as good as hers. With a bit of luck at the Grammys, she could be halfway to an EGOT in a couple of months. Beyoncé had it right two decades ago when she called Teyana Taylor a star. The rest of the world is just catching up.