Trending Now: Teyana Taylor Knew All This Would Happen – Fans React

Women of the Year Teyana Taylor Credit – Photograph by Xavier Scott Marshall for TIME

Teyana Taylor is balancing a workload that borders on ridiculous. On the day we speak, her to-do list includes participating in a Q&A about One Battle After Another, one of many stops on the Oscars campaign circuit; prepping to promote her Air Jordan 3 during NBA All-Star weekend; pulling looks for a shoot, because she’s her own stylist; casting for her feature directorial debut Get Lite; and rerecording dialogue for another project. All this after the mother of two turned in her latest culinary-school assignment—key lime pie, Cuban sandwiches, and Huli Huli chicken—that morning.

(Really.)

“I love when it’s hard—that means it’s of purpose,” Taylor says. “I want everything that is supposed to be mine. And I’m going to work my ass off to make sure that I see that.”

Part of that work is patience. The 35-year-old has wanted this moment for more than half her life. Five years ago, she was “retired” from music and her biggest acting credit was what she called a “hot girl” role in Coming 2 America. Cut to 2026: she was nominated for a Grammy for her album Escape Room, won a Golden Globe, and is now the front runner for Best Supporting Actress at the Oscars. Taylor identifies as a “creative”—not just an actor, director, musician, dancer, or choreographer, but all of the above. And if making it as any one of those is hard, then being taken seriously for all of them is nearly impossible. So, she says, it took time.

Taylor likes metaphors—she calls herself a “Glade PlugIn,” because you can stick her anywhere and she’ll get to work. She speaks in phrases that could be lyrics, circling a point as she plays with word choice and emphasis. When I ask what this moment feels like, she picks up an imaginary bow and arrow. “This is the view,” she says, pointing into the distance at an invisible row of bottles. She cocks her elbow, taking aim. “God, he’s right behind me. We pull back”—she draws her arm farther past her shoulder, adding tension as she counts the years that passed. “Here’s the work, here’s the tears, here’s the prayers, the ups, the downs.” And then, at year 20, she lets her arrow fly. “It knocked down all the bottles at the same time,” she says. “That’s what it feels like.”

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.”

Perfidia’s response is extreme—she abandons her family to continue her activism—but to villainize her, as some audiences have, is to miss the point. “Maybe men would look at Perfidia as selfish,” Taylor says. But a lot of women understand her. “It felt good to see a woman put herself first in a world where we’re forced to be strong. We’re forced to be supermoms, superwives, superwomen—to the point of when we take off our capes for a little bit, we don’t even get grace.”

“I always wonder,” she adds, “What if Bob had walked through the door and helped her?”

Like Perfidia, Taylor knows who she is and what she wants, and she’s not afraid to say it loud. She’s refused to pick a lane even as people in her industry told her to focus on one thing at a time. When she walked away from music in 2020, saying she felt underappreciated, “Everybody told me it was dumb,” she says. “And I was like, ‘No, I am going to be a great actress. One day, I am going to be a great director.’”

Now look at her.

If Taylor is feeling the pressure that comes with an Oscar nomination, she doesn’t show it. “Even if I go home empty-handed, I have won,” she says, because a nod means she’s one of the best and because she’s gotten to bond with her peers, including her “awards-season bestie,” fellow nominee Jacob Elordi. “We’re young, we’re blessed, we’re being celebrated—this is the time to be happy and to have fun with it, especially in a space that some people take so serious, and some people are cold, some people are robotic,” Taylor says. “I know to the world, it looks spicy, but we’re literally just in our own little world… Half the time we’re talking about having the same haircut, going mullet for mullet.”

While Taylor understands the necessity of hard work, she knows it has to mean something beyond the accolades. She returned to music to make Escape Room because letting go allowed her to fall back in love with it. And because her journey through a public divorce and a new relationship gave her fresh material. “I had something to talk about,” she says. “I had experienced love. I had experienced heartbreak. I had experienced healing.”

She’ll take a “tiny” vacation after the Oscars before diving right back into the chaos. She starts filming Get Lite in June, wants to take Escape Room on tour in late summer, and graduates from culinary school in September. Beyond that? “I would love the EGOT,” she says. “And if I don’t get that Tony, guess what that T is gonna stand for? Teyana.”

There’s just a touch of “I told you so” energy in the way she talks about her plans. “When you have a creative that does it all, let them spread their wings,” she says. “Never cage a creative.”

She snaps her head up, eyes wide: “That’s a bar.” She grabs a pen.

Teyana Taylor photographs by Xavier Scott Marshall for TIME; Photo Production: Ava Selbach; Set Design by Annika Fischer; Hair by Edith Donaldson; Makeup by Yeika Oliva; Fashion Direction by Teyana Taylor; opener: Wardrobe: Dilara Findikoglu blouse, Loewe skirt, Balenciaga boots; cover: Ottolinger top, Jean Paul Gaultier shorts; on white: Thom Browne coat; Quadriptych: Tareet look; curtain: Ashi Studio dress; Street: Thom Browne look

Write to Lucy Feldman at lucy.feldman@time.com.