“I didn’t care”: Why Teyana Taylor refused to play her idol on-screen
Teyana Taylor has been winning awards left and right for her amazing performance in One Battle After Another, but she could have ruined her career if she had starred in an unfortunate biopic.
The path for singers to become actors is a surprisingly fruitful one that has been completed in the past by artists like Frank Sinatra, Will Smith, Mark Wahlberg, and Lady Gaga, among others, in which Teyana Taylor is the latest, as she solidified herself as an actor to watch with her emotional performance in the Sundance drama A Thousand and One.
Rather than appearing in a vanity project in which she simply played an exaggerated version of herself, she chose to give a truly transformative performance in which she played a single mother trying to raise an adopted child.
Taylor’s career has now hit new heights thanks to her explosive, emotional performance in Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest masterpiece, which broke records with its number of Academy Award nominations. Although it is likely that One Battle After Another will end up winning ‘Best Picture’ (unless Sinners pulls the upset of the decade), it’s also a real possibility that Taylor will earn the ‘Best Supporting Actress’ prize, as she has already won the Golden Globe in the same category.
Her success in the film is because of how surprising it was, as there are many audience members who likely didn’t see A Thousand and One, and didn’t know what she was capable of; however, Taylor was offered a much different acting opportunity a decade earlier that could have taken her career in the completely opposite direction.
The actor has frequently stated that the R&B artist Aaliyah is one of her biggest heroes and someone who inspired her to find her own voice, so when Lifetime began developing the made-for-television biopic Aaliyah: The Princess of R&B, which explored the late singer’s life up until her tragic death in a 2001 plane crash, Taylor was one of the first picks to play the titular role, but she passed on the project, stating that she “didn’t care about the movie”.
While turning down an opportunity to play one’s idol must have been a difficult choice, Taylor was smart to consider what the depiction of Aaliyah would actually say. Music biopics have become very popular in the industry, but they are of intermittent quality; for every smashing success like A Complete Unknown or Straight Outta Compton, there is a complete misfire like Back in Black or All Eyez On Me, and even if she had given a great performance as Aaliyah, there’s no guarantee that it would have been a successful film.
Taylor was also smart to recognise what type of production the film was going to be, as Lifetime originals have a track record of being melodramatic, manipulative, and highly sanitised, and considering that Aaliyah had a controversial career filled with ups and downs, Taylor wouldn’t have benefited from being in a film that reduced her life story and failed to consider the longstanding legacy of her work.
Ultimately, the actor was proven correct when Aaliyah: The Princess of R&B was met with disdain by viewers, many of whom mocked the film for ignoring key aspects of the late singer’s controversial relationship with R Kelly, and had she signed on to play Aaliyah, it seems less likely that she would be in contention to win an Oscar.
