“Teyana Taylor! Who’s hotter than you right now?” asked Jimmy Fallon when the multi-hyphenate star sat down on the Tonight Show couch Wednesday night. It’s a fair question.
Taylor just won a Golden Globe for her performance in One Battle After Another. Escape Room, her first album in five years, is nominated for a Grammy. She’s on the cover of Vanity Fair. In nine days, she’s hosting Saturday Night Live with musical guest Geese (whose frontman Cameron Winter was recently filmed by OBAA director Paul Thomas Anderson onstage at Carnegie Hall). She’s also starring with Matt Damon and Ben Affleck in The Rip, which hits Netflix this Friday.
On The Tonight Show, Taylor spoke about her big moment, previewed the Damon/Affleck movie, performed a song from the album, cleared up what was going on with costar Leonardo DiCaprio’s viral KPop Demon Hunters moment. And in Vanity Fair, she even addressed the status of her relationship with former collaborator and label head Kanye West.
Let’s do the KPop thing first. During Sunday’s Golden Globes ceremony, DiCaprio could be seen excitedly chattering with someone across the room, at one point lapsing into an expression that looked suspiciously like his much-memed Django Unchained smile. In a video that went even more viral, lip-reading expert Jackie G explained that he was communicating in half-sentences about KPop Demon Hunters:
In an interview with Access Hollywood Tuesday, Taylor said a “kiki-ing” DiCaprio was talking to her in that clip. Her children are obsessed with KPop Demon Hunters, and the two actors were connecting over the movie’s success at the Globes (where it won Best Motion Picture – Animated and its signature song “Golden” was named Best Original Song). Here’s that interview:
Wednesday on Fallon, Taylor revised her story. She’d since spoken to DiCaprio, and they hashed out that he must have been speaking to someone else because, after learning all about the movie from their other costar Chase Infiniti, Taylor would have no trouble identifying the KPop team. Here’s that snippet from the interview:
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Taylor also talked about meeting Julia Roberts at the Globes, comparing the Hollywood icon’s approach to Moses parting the Red Sea. She discussed taking a hiatus from music before making Escape Room in order to flex different creative muscles. She talked about having to physically lift Affleck off his brother’s body for The Rip. It’s all viewable in the 10-minute video below.
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Later in the show, Taylor returned with Lucky Daye to perform their Escape Room single “Hard Part.” Here’s the performance:
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As for Kanye West — who cast Taylor in his 2016 “Fade” video, worked closely with her on some of her past music, and performed alongside her on SNL in 2018 — in the Vanity Fair piece, Taylor compared their relationship to a family bond, asserting that his various inflammatory and disgraceful behaviors have not caused her to cut ties. “I don’t have to agree with everything that he do or say, but I’m not going to, like, abandon him and be like, ‘Yeah, eff that motherfucker,'” she said. “My brothers do shit that I don’t agree with…. I don’t get into none of that.”
Lastly, here’s Taylor’s Golden Globes acceptance speech:
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