The 2026 Golden Globes are underway on CBS, and the first win of the night was Teyana Taylor taking the trophy for Best Supporting Actress in a Motion Picture for her performance as Perfidia Beverly Hills in One Battle After Another. This marked her first win at this awards show, so naturally she was quite emotional while giving her speech. During it, though, Taylor carved out some time to send a powerful message to “little Black girls” around
Naturally upon getting on the stage, Teyana Taylor first thanked the people in both in her personal and professional lives who, in different ways, importantly factored into the work she did on Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest movie. But before wrapping up, she delivered these inspiring words:
To my brown sisters and little brown girls watching tonight, our softness is not a liability. Our depth is not too much. Our light does not need permission to shine. We belong in every room we walk into. Our voices matter and our dreams deserve space.
Well said! Using a televised platform like the Golden Globes is a great way to get an important message across, and I’m glad that Teyona Taylor made sure to do so before walking off that stage. If she can inspire Black girls and women with her words, whether they follow in her footsteps by acting or channel that same passion into a different occupation, then so much the better. They deserve to have that same kind of confidence as they live their lives.
In One Battle After Another, one of CinemaBlend’s best movies of 2025, Teyana Taylor shares a sizable amount of screen time with Leonardo DiCaprio, as Perfidia and his character, "Ghetto" Pat Calhoun, become lovers while fighting together in the French 75 revolutionary group. At the same time, however, she also enters a secret and twisted relationship with Sean Penn’s Steven J. Lockjaw, whom she sexually humiliated when they first met. Perfidia eventually gets pregnant and gives birth to a girl named Willa, but then abandons her and Pat to continue her revolutionary activities, only to get caught after she killed a security guard during a bank robbery.
I’ll leave off with the spoilers now, though if you made it this far and haven’t seen One Battle After Another, I recommend rectifying that immediately by streaming it with an HBO Max subscription. Though this is arguably her biggest movie to date, Teyana Taylor is certainly no stranger to Hollywood. Her other notable credits include Coming 2 America, A Thousand and One, White Men Can’t Jump (the remake), The Book of Clarence and the Hulu series All’s Fair.
Now that Teyana Taylor has won her first Golden Globe, I’m eager to learn if she’ll also be nominated for her One Battle After Another performance at the 98th Academy Awards. If she is and ends up winning, then maybe she’ll have another powerful message to pass along. Meanwhile, Taylor can be seen next in the Matt Damon and Ben Affleck-led cop thriller The Rip, which will be streamable with a Netflix subscription starting January 16.
