The four movies Teyana Taylor couldn’t live without: “I feel like ya’ll gonna laugh at me”
Teyana Taylor is a force to be reckoned with, having dipped her toes into so many different avenues over the years and proving to be good at all of them, and while she’s recently found acclaim for her supporting role in Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, over the years, Taylor has done everything from choreographing Beyoncé videos, releasing albums (she’s just been nominated for a Grammy), and modelling.
With a Golden Globe nomination under her belt for Anderson’s film, it seems like she is entering a new era in terms of her acting career, and even after having made her film debut back in 2010’s dance movie Stomp the Yard: Homecoming, it’s only recently that she has started to appear in more acclaimed projects, and One Battle After Another is the ultimate proof of her acting chops.
When it comes to her favourite movies, though, she admits that she’s a big fan of watching the kind that haven’t historically been seen as particularly high-brow. “I feel like y’all are gonna laugh at me because I love chick flicks and rom-coms,” she told Letterboxd.
But, of course, there are many great rom-coms out there, and the only reason they’ve been demonised over the years is because of misogyny, and you’ve got to embrace a love for rom-coms, because it’s a great genre, which Taylor clearly knows inside out.
“Well, I love Pretty Woman,” she began, and she’s not alone in that as the film became the highest-grossing romantic comedy of all time when it was released in 1990, with Julia Roberts starring as an escort who is assigned the task of accompanying a businessman, played by Richard Gere, with the pair forming an unlikely relationship.
Inspired by George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, the film was a hit, and it remains one of Roberts’ defining roles all these years later, even being the only film of hers she would ever consider a sequel to.
Taylor also loves Waiting to Exhale, Forrest Whitaker’s directorial debut, which follows four women, including characters played by Angela Bassett and Whitney Houston, as they navigate friendships and romances. It was one of the first major rom-coms to centre African-American women in the lead, making it a turning point for representation in an otherwise rather white-dominated genre.
Another film that Taylor can’t get enough of is Titanic, as she emphasised, “I love Titanic”, and you can’t blame her for it’s not hard to get swept up in the drama of James Cameron’s epic blockbuster, which tells the tragic love story between Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jack and Kate Winslet’s Rose. Two youngsters from different social classes, falling in love aboard the doomed ship that inevitably sinks, putting an end to their intense and passionate affair, is sure to move you, and if you can watch Titanic and not feel the urge to cry, then you’re crazy.
Taylor’s final pick was Boogie Nights, as a nod to her One Battle After Another director, Anderson. The 1997 film really helped to put him on the map, with Mark Wahlberg starring as Dirk Diggler, who goes from washing dishes to entering the adult film industry during the height of the golden age of porn back in 1970s Los Angeles. It’s equal parts funny and dark, with a fantastic ensemble cast that makes it endlessly rewatchable, so it’s no wonder that Taylor loves it.
Teyana Taylor’s four beloved movies:
- Pretty Woman (Garry Marshall, 1990)
- Waiting to Exhale (Forest Whitaker, 1995)
- Titanic (James Cameron, 1997)
- Boogie Nights (Paul Thomas Anderson, 1997)
