Have you ever been so bone tired that you fell asleep in a full face of makeup? It’s not ideal, but it’s also not the end of the world. (Forgive me, dermatologists!) At least that’s what I tell Teyana Taylor at the end of a long June day in Los Angeles—one of her many very long days, of which lately there seems to be an endless parade, marching into both the recent past and the visible future. She tips her head back on the greige anonymous photo studio couch where we’re sitting and levels me with a look from behind a thick fringe of half-lowered eyelashes. “Girl, it is when all your bedding is cream.”

Taylor has good reason to be falling into bed at the end of the day, pristine sheets be damned. This month she returns to music after a five-year-long retirement with a new self-directed visual album, Escape Room, just as a slew of her serious acting roles—Tyler Perry’s Straw, Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, Ryan Murphy’s All’s Fair, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck’s The Rip, Kevin Hart’s 72 Hours—roll out, back to back to back. (There’s more on the horizon, too, including her forthcoming feature directorial debut, Get Lite, and an as-yet-untitled Dionne Warwick biopic for which Warwick handpicked Taylor.) It is what people in the industry like to call a moment, what Teyana Taylor is experiencing right now, and the only thing a moment requires of you is that you meet it. 

So it’s a good kind of tired, Taylor’s tired. It’s the tired that comes with recognition and respect and getting everything you ever wanted. “I’m tired, but in the best way,” she says. “I’m tired from the hard work and understanding that the more and more tired I get, it really means everything’s paying off.”

The night before our conversation, Taylor appeared onstage at the 2025 BET awards to perform her single “Long Time,” a futuristic fantasia that had her dancing mid-air, suspended from the ceiling in a silver robot suit. Then she spent all-day at the photo shoot that accompanies this story. She also has two young kids. So she probably got around two hours of sleep, she thinks. Her one request for our interview was the ingredients to make a Shirley Temple (use ginger ale, not Sprite, she insists, and don’t plant the straw in the grenadine at the bottom; the point is to get the acid and the soda and the sweet all together) and an order of lemon pepper chicken wings. She digs in before lying back on the couch in her sweatsuit. About an hour into our interview her eyelids begin to sink lower and lower until they’re mostly at half-mast, and honestly, I get it: She’s earned her rest, wherever she can find it.

(A week before this story published, Teyana’s body forced her to finally take time off. She announced on Instagram Stories that her doctors found a noncancerous growth on one of her vocal cords and she would be having surgery to remove it. “It’s not lost on me,” she shared with her followers, that “just as I was getting ready to finally share this [album] with you, life handed me my own unexpected ‘Escape Room’—one I didn’t ask for, but one I now have to find my way out of with patience, rest, and faith.”)

Taylor is a soft presence in person, which feels notable for someone both so hardworking and hardbodied. The famed physique, I regret to inform you, after watching her eat wings, Cheetos, and a handful of Cinnamon Toast Crunch from the box, is largely due to genetics (she says she even had six-pack abs as a kid, “like a Ninja Turtle”), but also attributed to the fact that she spends most days in motion—job to job, chasing her kids around, dancing. She feels taller than her 5-feet-5-inches, and is effortless in clothes as elaborate as her Met Gala look (a tailored pinstripe suit with pleated cape and plumed hat, designed in collaboration with Black Panther costumer Ruth E. Carter) or as everyday as a fitted cap and blazer. “I’ve always been a fashion girl,” she says. “I always just knew how to put that shit on.” (It’s not about labels for Taylor, especially not the ones everyone else is wearing, often just to signify that they can. “I like dope things,” Taylor says, “but I also realize that I influence a lot of people, and I want it to be of substance. I want it to, you know, make sense: be about personal style instead of labels.”) She says she is both deeply shy and often nervous, which makes absolutely no sense if you’ve ever seen her perform. “Everytime I’m about to get on stage I think I have to pee,” she says. This is harder when you’re in a robot costume, naturally.

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Taylor’s been a performer since she was young, raiding her mom’s closet in Harlem, “walking around, dancing to Michael Jackson, Janet Jackson, that’s always been me,” she says, repeating herself, as she often does, for emphasis: “always been me.” She is nothing if not a woman who knows herself. Her mother, Nikki Taylor, recognized that right away. “I didn’t know what it was, but I knew she was going to do something,” Nikki tells me. “By 14, she said, Mom, this is what I want to do. So, let’s go for it.” They did: Nikki became her manager, and they set off to make Teyana, a natural triple threat, a star. Within a few years, Taylor was featured on MTV’s My Super Sweet Sixteen (the theme of her party was “‘80s old-school skateboard;” Heatherette’s Richie Rich custom-made her a neon-splashed tulle extravaganza of a dress), had signed to Pharrell Willams’s Star Trak Entertainment label, and was enlisted to teach Beyoncé a Harlem-born dance craze called the Chicken Noodle Soup. She subsequently “hustled” her way to a full choreographer credit on the music video for ‘Ring the Alarm.’ “I just kind of knew,” she says of summoning the self-confidence to pitch herself to Beyoncé as a teen, “though now I see where my daughter [Junie] came from.” Whatever it was, she knew she had it: Her first single, in 2008, was called “Google Me.” 

Despite the early attention, recognition from the music industry was slow going. Taylor released her debut mixtape, From a Planet Called Harlem, in 2009, when she was 19, and then left Star Trak in 2012 to sign with Kanye West’s GOOD Music, at the time a subsidiary of Def Jam Recordings. She released three albums, 2014’s VII, 2018’s K.T.S.E, and 2020’s The Album, to little fanfare. She received significantly more attention for her dancing in West’s viral ‘Fade’ music video than she had for any of her own music. It was frustrating: She felt like she was consistently being sidelined; opportunities were being left on the table. She announced her retirement from the music industry on Instagram Live in December 2020, citing feeling “super under-appreciated” as well as prioritizing her own well-being and her two young daughters, Junie and Rue Rose. She is not, and never has been, the kind of person who can sit on her hands instead of taking action herself. “I can’t let this kill me,” she told her fans: “Baby, I gotta do it for my mental health. I have to do it for my emotional health. I have to do it for my kids, so I can stay alive for my kids.”

The label was kind of “bum-rushing my other dreams” back then, she tells me. “I always consider myself a Glade PlugIn. You can plug me in anywhere. Anywhere they got a socket, plug me in. Why don’t we plug in the bathroom, make the bathroom smell good? Why don’t we plug in the kitchen? Why don’t we plug in this whole goddamn building, make the whole building smell good? You know what I’m saying? Like, don’t lock me in a room.” (Taylor frequently references her reticence to being “kept in a box” or “locked in a room” when she talks about her career’s many chapters. It’s not for nothing that this new album is called Escape Room.) She was sick of feeling walled off and under-utilized. “So many other things I wanna do and it’s always getting written off. [The label was] like, Well, all right, cool, once we get this album out you could… Once we get this album out you could…” Having Rue shifted her priorities: She now had two times as much example to set. “My grind is different, my hustle is different. Like, I’m not playing with y’all, my tolerance is different, what I’m willing to take and what I’m not willing to take—you get what I’m saying? Motherhood is what made me start to pour more into the other things that I love to do and also to help other people.” So she called it: no more music.

She turned her focus to passions that had been getting pushed aside: acting, as well as creative directing and producing for other artists with big dreams and not-so-big budgets. “I know how it feels to have big ideas and be really ambitious, and people looking at you like you got five heads,” she says. “I never want the word ‘impossible’ to be in a creative vocabulary.” It was a faith walk, she says: “I always trust in God, but that was a time when I leaned on him a lot more than I usually did. I leaned on him fully, and fully prayed, like, on my knees.” She was determined to adapt and to thrive in her new circumstances, she says. She remembers her mindset, which she recounts to me solemnly, almost like an affirmation: “I guarantee you I’m going to come back stronger and better. I will be an amazing actress. I will be an amazing director. I will be an amazing creative director. I will protect other artists and help other artists bring their visions to life.”

The moment she took that big bet on herself, that leap away from the label and into the unknown, she says “everything started happening the exact way in the exact order that I said it.” She was cast in 2021’s Coming 2 America alongside Eddie Murphy and Wesley Snipes, and then as the star of A.V. Rockwell’s 2023 film A Thousand and One, earning a Breakthrough Performance Award from the National Board of Review for her turn as a devoted single mother who kidnaps her son from the foster care system. Just like that, Taylor was firmly in the next chapter of her career: movie star.

Now she’s the female lead in a star-studded film from one of Hollywood’s most respected directors. Paul Thomas Anderson cast her in his hotly anticipated film One Battle After Another (September 26), inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s Reagan-era novel Vineland. Taylor is a new character in the story, Perfidia Beverly Hills, who is something like the film’s narrative pulse: a fiercely independent revolutionary and femme fatale who enraptures the male leads (Leonardo DiCaprio and Sean Penn, playing hero and villain, respectively), instigates the action, and provides the plot’s engine, even when she’s off screen. (In the manner of all Anderson—and Pynchon—plots, this one is tricky to explain, especially without ruining it, beyond the fact that it diverts enormously from the source material and is incredibly prescient in terms of the country’s drift towards white nationalism and preoccupation with immigration.) “Very early on, when we were having conversations about casting, we kept coming back to Teyana’s name over and over again,” says DiCaprio. “We knew we needed someone who was fearless, who wasn’t afraid to represent this outspoken, freedom-fighting character. We knew we needed someone who could bring such an intense, ambitious, and complicated person to life—and that was Teyana.” Anderson describes working with Taylor this way: “A hell of a lot of fun. She thinks like a filmmaker. She’s a good listener and she’s got a big mouth. Good combo.”

Taylor plays a mother, as she often does, though Perfidia is not exactly the maternal type. Her passion and purpose is revolution, a baby doesn’t change that. (Even one with Leonardo DiCaprio.) “One of the many great things about Paul [Thomas Anderson] is that he let us improvise many of our scenes and some of Teyana’s most powerful scenes are improvised, and I think that just speaks volumes of what she brought to her performance,” DiCaprio adds. “She really dove into the essence of Perfidia and the feelings of being torn as a mother, as a partner, and as a revolutionary.” (“There’s a scene where she absolutely man-handles Leo in the back of the car,” Anderson says. “It was fun watching her boss him around and fuck with him.”) At one point Perfidia fires a machine gun using her heavily pregnant belly to stabilize the barrel, an image that, Taylor and I agree, is “some badass shit.” Not least, Taylor says, because people often treat pregnant women like they’re made of porcelain, but also because she remembers a time in the industry when “it was almost scary to be pregnant. Like, Oh my god, you can’t have a baby right now, it’s your career! To me, that image shows freedom. It shows that I am still all of the things.”

She loved every minute of the production, including working with DiCaprio, who she calls an old friend. “That was always my buddy, but the movie was my first time working with him, seeing him in a completely different light. And him just kind of being a mentor and being a great leader, it was really dope to see. He don’t play no games with that.” Anderson, meanwhile, “is a rare gem,” Taylor tells me. “He’s like a mad scientist. He is an absolute genius. He’s one of those directors I want to work with multiple times. You know how you have that actor-director link up where it’s like every time they link up, it just gets better and better and better? That’s the type of ‘ship that I see with PTA.” Anderson also sees a future together: “I do feel that there’s more to do with Teyana” he says. “She has one of the most photographable faces in the world.”

Taylor did appreciate the “fun” change in wardrobe for Ryan Murphy’s upcoming female-fronted legal drama, All’s Fair, though—the leap from Perfidia’s bare skin to the kind of glam befitting a project helmed by Kim Kardashian. The two first met at the Cannes Film Festival over a decade ago. “I just remember her walking down the red carpet and she was so beautiful,” Kardashian says, “she was just so cool.” All’s Fair marks the first time they’ve worked together on-screen. “[Between takes], we’re telling our stories of what we did over the weekend,” Kardashian says. Sometimes they’d drive to set together “so we can talk and catch up about what’s going on in life.”

There has been a lot happening, professionally and personally. In 2023, Taylor quietly filed for divorce from her husband of more than six years, NBA player Iman Shumpert. Since, she has remained fiercely protective over her family and their privacy. In March, she took to Instagram Live to quiet the rumor mill: “I am begging y’all to let me get my back blown out in peace.” To that end, this spring, she began appearing on red carpets and posting Instagrams with the actor Aaron Pierre, though she is reluctant to openly discuss him. “I just go with the flow, and I’m trying things a little differently” this time, she tells me, “just protecting my peace and privacy.”

If Hollywood has provided some welcome escapism for the star to step into someone else’s life, returning to music allowed her to excavate the depths and range of her own feelings over the past five years. “Oh my God, the album is so good,” Taylor says of Escape Room. She calls it an “ombre album,” because of all the shades in it, from dark to light, mournful to sexy. “I think when you hear records it’s like either they are really, really heavy or they’re really, really light. Like, oh this is so sweet. How’d you get there? Or, oh my god that’s so heavy. How did you get there?” Nobody ever talks about the in-between, she says: all the stages of growing and maturing, breaking free and falling in love. “What this album does is break down the in-betweens.” Tracks are preceded by spoken word recordings she wrote, voiced by “women I love and respect,” including Sarah Paulson, Jodie Turner-Smith, Taraji P. Henson, and Kerry Washington. Taylor loves Escape Room because it “takes you through every single stage of vulnerability, from heartbreak to repair, from heartbreak to healing… I think it’s so universal that you can literally customize it to fit you.”

I got an early listen of Escape Room at Def Jam’s headquarters in New York City. It is an emotive and wide-ranging album, carnal and wild, ruminative and romantic. There are club tracks and R&B bangers and ballads alike, laid out to trace one relationship’s demise and a new one’s beginning. The overall feeling is one of relief and rebirth. She avoids acknowledging any immediate parallels to her personal life, preferring to refer to it as a “universal charger” for anyone going through something: “You can plug it in anywhere, and it’ll charge you up. That’s what I always say when people ask me about the album, because I think, with my circumstances, people automatically think it’s about one thing—” namely, the dissolution of her marriage, and her new relationship with Pierre, who does, for the record, appear rolling around in bed with her in the romantic video for the second single, ‘Bed of Roses.’ (She maintains that neither this nor the Instagram carousel she posted of them on his birthday in June counts as a ‘hard launch.’ “It’s always easier to go to work when it’s with people that you love, cherish, and appreciate, and when it’s with people that don’t play about you,” is what she’ll say of choosing her collaborators, including Pierre.) “I’ve had a lot of ups and downs within this music industry, like my love-hate relationship with music, different things like that. Escape Room is for people to escape anything.”

There are a million things that could and will break your heart, she says. “Whether it’s a relationship, whether it’s a business ‘ship, whether it’s leaving a company, anything that does not serve you, does not see you, appreciate you, value you, you must escape—sometimes even including ourselves. Sometimes we go through these stages where we’re just not us. Sometimes you gotta escape back to yourself. Escape back to the best version of you.”

She recorded according to what felt like divine order. “Not trying to run too fast. Not trying to run through so many things at one time. Also not trying to look back neither.” She felt she was better, and stronger, and had plenty to say; she was ready to re-engage with the music industry on her terms. “I felt like I was back in a space where it’s like, okay, cool, I can get back into music because now I’m in a space where it’s peaceful again. I always loved music. I didn’t like the politics of music and the games that came with the music… it is a wicked game.” Def Jam welcomed her back with open arms. Now, she says, she can make her own rules. “I’m doing it my way. And I’m not doing it for stats. I’m not doing it for anything beyond the love of it. I could sell one copy and be perfectly fine.”

A month later, I catch Taylor while she’s in Florida. She is better rested, but still on the go: As she paces through her place, I get a Zoom-view of her eyebrow and various ceiling trims until she settles down at a desk. Among the exhaustive promotional schedule major films and album releases require, she’s had some welcome downtime. The family was at her house in Atlanta for the Fourth of July, with a big cookout and fireworks, the whole bit, and she’s just enrolled in culinary school, a long-held dream she felt she’d put off for too long. “You can add ‘chef’ to my bio,” she says with an audible wink. She plans to go back for her degree in pastry arts after she completes the culinary course; the goal is a restaurant and bakery one day, she says. Junie, off camera, pipes up, wanting to know if she can work there too, maybe behind the register. “Of course, baby,” Taylor says, before issuing directions to an off-screen member of her entourage to pick up supplies for her first assignment. I tell her I admire the new addition (classes! homework!) to her already packed schedule. It’s what we were talking about last time, she says, “not being stuck in one box, and checking off every single thing that I want to do…I’m done with people allowing the different things that I do to be a popularity contest. Hey, if I got the willpower and the energy to do it, then I’m going to do it.” 

For her, cooking and baking is restorative: “I think it forces me to sit down and do something that brings me normalcy. It’s my therapy.” She works so hard, Nikki Taylor tells me, at everything, from being a devoted parent to putting out the best work she can in so many different arenas. “I sit and I watch her, you know, and I’m just still in awe, even as her mom and her manager, I’m still in awe of her every day.”

It made me think of something Taylor said back in June, about the magic of being open to the universe and its plans for you. “Don’t even be in the future, don’t be in the past, be in the present, because you can be in the present right now and literally gone tomorrow,” she told me. “Imagine skipping your present, [because you’re] looking into the future. I love to dream, but I’m not gonna skip what’s right here to get right there. Because that’s also the power of patience,” she said, perfectly mixed Shirley Temple in hand. “Understanding your timing and understanding [that] whatever is for you, is meant for you, is going to be for you, because it’s already written for you.” She has so many chapters left to go.