Teyana Taylor's character uses her sexuality to her advantage, not to get taken advantage of.
She thinks the harsh reality of how Black women are fetishized and least protected is difficult for some to accept.
Teyana dedicates her win to empower Black women, asserting their softness, depth, and right to shine.
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Teyana Taylor isn’t letting the criticism of her One Battle After Another character get her down.
Source: Brianna Bryson / Getty
The singer-turned-actress is buzzing after her big win at the Golden Globes, winning Best Supporting Actress, and beating heavyweights like Emily Blunt, Elle Fanning, Ariana Grande, Amy Madigan, and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas.
Sadly, the reaction to her win hasn’t been completely positive, even from fans of Taylor. A lot of folks who watched One Battle After Another criticized the film for over-sexualizing Teyana’s character, comparing her win to Halle Berry’s Oscar for Monster’s Ball, a role where her character had sex with Billy Bob Thornton.
Throughout the film, Taylor’s character, Perfidia Beverly Hills, became a fixation for Sean Penn’s Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw, a corrupt, ultraconservative white man in power who has an obsession with Black women in private. In a conversation with Vanity Fair released following her Golden Globe win, Taylor tiptoed around the topic, making sure not to get into specifics.
“I think we don’t enjoy seeing the harsh reality, but this is what’s happening,” she says when asked about the criticsm of Perfidia.
“Another person interviewed me and mentioned something about Perfidia and how people felt like she was overly horny,” she continued. “And I’m like, do you realize the first thing we see of Perfidia is her having a gun to a guy’s head and he calls her sweet thing? Are you—are we watching the same film?”
Taylor went on to explain that she seems to see her character uses her sexuality to her advantage rather than getting taken advantage of.
“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,’” she said.
This isn’t the first time Teyana has addressed this line of thinking, insisting the reality of her character is simply too hard to accept for some viewers during an interview with The Hollywood Reporter last year.
“Is that not what Black women go through?” she said. “We are fetishized, especially by creepy motherfuckers. And we are, unfortunately, the least protected people. Showing what Black women go through, that’s a hard reality to accept. And this movie should spark debate, I always knew it would, because sometimes you just got to shake the table.”
In her Golden Globes acceptance speech, the Grammy-nominated artist also paid a heartfelt tribute to her Black roots, finishing her speech by dedicating her win to “my Brown sisters and little Brown girls watching.”
“Our softness is not a liability. Our depth is not too much,” Taylor said. “Our light does not need permission to shine. We belong in every room we walk into. Our voices matter, and our dreams deserve space.”
Since a lot of women didn’t like how Taylor was portrayed in the film, they weren’t exactly pleased with the idea of little Brown girls following in her footsteps. Check out some reactions to Teyana’s win and her acceptance speech down below:
