How many hours of sleep a night do you think Teyana Taylor gets? Six? Five? There’s no way it’s a full eight, as rested and poised as she may appear to be on a red carpet. Few people on the awards-season circuit this year are working as hard or as much as Taylor. The actor and singer earned a Golden Globe on January 11 for her stirring first-act turn in One Battle After Another, which was huge but feels like the 17th huge thing that has happened to the star in the past week or so. Taylor does it all: She acts, she sings, she raises children, she inexplicably attends culinary school — and all the while subjects herself to relentless campaigning ahead of the Oscars.
Part of what unites Taylor’s performance in One Battle with her ongoing public appearances is that she’s committed to being a scene-stealer. Though Paul Thomas Anderson was the one accepting the Critics Choice Award, his moment inevitably ceded itself to her celebration of his victory as she shouted and hugged him like a high-school-football coach. Her Golden Globes speech, which followed a week later, was simultaneously deeply heartfelt and unexpectedly funny (wearing a very low-cut dress, she started her speech half-crying, “See my party in the back?”). She later went on to indirectly steal the show by being the person to whom Leonardo DiCaprio was mouthing a funny story, his exaggerated performance an impression of her response to the KPop Demon Hunters win. Her Instagram Stories since the Globes have been chock-full of well-wishes from other celebrities (Beyoncé, for example) and fashion houses — everyone seemingly swept up in the wave of Taylor’s success.
Her only — if any — press faux pas has been her reiteration of her continued support for and friendship with Ye. In her Vanity Fair cover story, the star said, “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 motherfucker.’ My brothers do shit that I don’t agree with … I don’t get into none of that.” Even in terms of her ongoing support, Taylor was quick to clarify that she doesn’t actually agree with Ye or endorse that which he does. She added that one of the tenets of their relationship is that she can tell him the truth and he’ll listen. “He knows he’s gonna get a real answer,” she said. Beyond that, however, the worst thing Taylor has done is shake Anderson a little too much when he won his Critics Choice Award, and even that was at least pretty funny.
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You’d think, maybe, she would take some time off in between awards shows, but she’s still balancing attending culinary school with promotion for The Rip, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck’s latest film. “I ain’t letting up,” she wrote on Instagram as though she knows what we’re all thinking. It’s easy to think that might just be applying to the past week and a half of her life, but Taylor has been at it for years. She was on My Super Sweet 16, and she has a flourishing music career. She never got the “young Hollywood”–style spotlight. She just kept working. Just as her One Battle character, Perfidia, operates at a sprint, Taylor runs circles around her competitors and peers alike — almost as if she’s born to do this.
