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Teyana Taylor reveals how her own experience with postpartum depression informed her role in One Battle After Another.
The actress and singer, who shares two daughters Rue, 5, and Iman “Junie” Tayla, 10, with ex Iman Shumpert, tells PEOPLE that she needed to “go down a rabbit hole” to understand how people experience postpartum depression differently.
In One Battle After Another, Taylor takes on the role of Perfidia, a Black revolutionary and former leader of the radical group the French 75, who has has a relationship — and subsequently a child — with Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio).
At the same time, Taylor also navigates a sexual relationship with Steven Lockjaw (Sean Penn). During the film, Perfidia wields her sexuality, while also being desired by both men.
As Perfidia, Taylor needed to reflect on her own experience with postpartum depression.
Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
“How I may have handled my postpartum depression is not how the next woman has handled hers,” Taylor, 35, tells PEOPLE. “So if anything, going into this topic was now understanding, I need to go down a rabbit hole and see the different things of what happens to us when we’re dealing with this and stepping outside of myself and seeing what happens to me.”
According to Taylor, the way that Perfidia handled her postpartum depression experience “was the result of feeling unheard, unseen, not beautiful and like a piece of meat.”
Warner Bros.
“It resulted [in] her to feel[ing] like, ‘Okay, I need to be selfish and show up for myself, even at the expense of leaving my own child,'” she says. “But who are we to judge how she handles postpartum depression after being ignored?”
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With the role of Perfidia, she needed to touch on not only postpartum depression, but “selfishness and the decisions that we make when we get power hungry or greedy and how things backfire.”
“I definitely love that this movie was able to shake the table and create that healthy dialogue,” explains Taylor.
