Teyana Taylor Can’t Be Stopped Now

Teyana Taylor has performed many roles since she was 15: dancer, choreographer, singer, My Tremendous Candy 16 star, director, actor, and extra lately, mom. However she’s recognized all alongside she’s able to much more. Consider her as a Glade plug-in, she says. “I’ve solely been plugged into one wall down within the nook within the toilet,” she explains, spinning the metaphor. “I may very well be plugged within the kitchen, the bed room, the household room, the good room. Like I may even be plugged into the AC filter, what I’m saying?”

Anybody who’s seen A.V. Rockwell’s debut function A Thousand and One might be additionally satisfied there’s nothing Teyana Taylor can’t do. Within the central function of Inez, a girl lately launched from jail who kidnaps her six-year-old son from the foster system, Taylor is charismatic and ferocious, introspective and tender, taking part in a girl clinging to motherhood as an escape from a difficult life she will’t in any other case discover a approach out of. A Thousand and One can be a chronicle of a altering Harlem, assembly Inez within the early ’90s and following her and her son by means of the transformations of the Giuliani and Bloomberg eras. 

For the Harlem-raised Taylor, Inez was a well-recognized character, together with her errors. “I don’t assume Inez did something out of the abnormal that any of us haven’t executed,” she says. “Getting in our personal approach, taking every thing private, growth, growth, growth, growth.” She fought exhausting for the function and constructed a deep belief with Rockwell, drawing on her personal expertise as a music video director to construct the movie alongside her. “I perceive what it’s to be each in entrance of the lens and behind the lens,” Taylor says. “I believe for [Rockwell] it was additionally a consolation in understanding, like, I see what you see, boo. I do know what a sure shot ought to appear like, I do know precisely what to do, precisely how one can catch it.”

A Thousand and One premiered earlier this yr at Sundance, the place it gained the grand jury prize; it opens in theaters this week from Focus Options. Taylor, who stars within the Kenya Barris–written White Males Can’t Soar remake later this yr and can be prepping her function directorial debut, says A Thousand and One has already opened new doorways—or to make use of her metaphor, new locations to be plugged in. “I really feel like this function has already modified my life and it hasn’t even come out but,” she says. “You recognize, I acquired plenty of nos in my life, and this one small sure acquired me plenty of huge yeses on the way in which.”