Teyana Taylor isn’t letting the criticism of her One Battle After Another character get her down.
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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.”
