Enjoying a mom additionally got here fairly naturally to Taylor, who has two daughters together with her ex-husband, the previous NBA participant Iman Shumpert. Within the movie, after Perfidia offers beginning to Willa, her postpartum melancholy leads her to make a life-altering resolution. “It was dope to deliver Perfidia to life as a result of I’ve been in that area earlier than,” Taylor reveals. “I’ve been in survival mode. I knew what that seemed like. I’m a mother of two, so I can sympathize. I really like that Paul was in a position to deliver consciousness to a girl’s psychological well being after giving beginning. Everyone handles issues otherwise. The way in which Perfidia dealt with it is probably not the way in which that I’d have dealt with it in actual life, however who’re you to inform a girl the way to deal with her postpartum melancholy?”
However for all the load that Taylor needed to bear onscreen, she made positive to find time for pleasure when the cameras stopped rolling. For one factor, she dropped at set her chef, who handled the forged and crew to a number of helpings of rasta pasta. Ever the extrovert, she was additionally comfortable to tackle the position of social coordinator. “I used to be at all times like, ‘Let’s do one thing! Let’s go!’ I’m the category clown—at all times joking, at all times enjoying. I like to make everyone giggle, even when that giggle solely lasts for 5 seconds. It feels good realizing that I performed an element in that.”
One night time, whereas they have been filming in California, she took everybody out to a basketball sport. “All of us sat courtside at a Sacramento Kings sport,” she says. Taylor had lived within the metropolis when Shumpert performed for the group. “It felt like house to me, and I cherished with the ability to take the forged out and vibe with everyone.”
When she was simply breaking into the trade, Taylor, who’s initially from Harlem, didn’t have a tendency to hang around with castmates after work like she does now. She was a young person when she starred in her first movie, 2010’s Stomp the Yard: Homecoming. “Once I first acquired into the sport, I used to be nonetheless in class,” she recollects. “I nonetheless had a curfew.” Within the years since her debut, she’s gone on to star in Tyler Perry’s Madea’s Large Blissful Household, the drama Brotherly Love, and the 2023 indie A Thousand and One, which earned her crucial acclaim and a Critics Alternative Award.