Taylor has long recognized that you have to make the most of every opportunity. This is the same person who, as a 15-year-old dance-battling in Harlem, got called in to teach Beyoncé one dance (the chicken noodle soup) and ended up choreographing her entire “Ring the Alarm” video. The same kid who got signed by Pharrell Williams at 15 and showed up on My Super Sweet 16. The same artist who stopped by a Kanye West recording session to look at clothes for his tour, hummed loudly to catch his attention, and ended up recording vocals for two songs on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. So when filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson offered her a role in One Battle, amid a cast loaded with heavy hitters like Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Benicio Del Toro, and Regina Hall, Taylor imbued her 20 minutes of screen time with so much pop and zeal she ran away with the whole thing.
Her character Perfidia Beverly Hills, the leader of the revolutionary group the French 75, is brash, unapologetic, and determined to change the world. She’s also physically striking, given Taylor’s famously cut figure, pixie cut, and single lash extensions framing each eye. But for all the memes celebrating Perfidia’s magnetism and bravado (if you haven’t seen a clip of her blasting a machine gun while pregnant, please check your internet connection), it’s the vulnerability Taylor brings that makes the performance connect. There’s a scene when Perfidia is sobbing on the other side of a closed door, pulled down by the weight of postpartum depression. The father of her baby, DiCaprio’s Bob, listens to her cries, but he doesn’t give her support.
“That’s something I think every mom has been through,” says Taylor, who also channeled her own postpartum experience in the 2023 movie A Thousand and One. “We’re dealing with not feeling heard, not feeling seen, not feeling beautiful.”
