We’ve seen many different variations and mutations of Teyana Taylor over the years: preening teen on MTV’s My Super Sweet 16; solo music artist; choreographer and breathtaking dancer (remember that “Fade” video?); wife and mom (she’s married to former Knicks player Iman Shumpert); and star of reality shows, including The Masked Singer, which she won in 2022.
What we’ve seen less of from the multi-hyphenate are turns as an actor. While she’s appeared in a handful of productions — Madea’s Big Happy Family and Coming 2 America — no previous role quite matches her latest: a troubled young mom who kidnaps her 6-year-old son in the new indie drama A Thousand and One. Taylor delivers a knockout, try-not-to-cry performance in the film, helping it win the coveted Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival this year. It’s a role sure to make Taylor henceforth known as an actor first … which is all the more surprising given that she wasn’t exactly the creator’s first choice.
“As I was writing the film, I didn’t think of Teyana at all,” A Thousand and One’s writer-director, A.V. Rockwell, tells Shondaland. “I just wasn’t really that familiar with her background as an actress. By the time we actually got to her [for auditions], I could see that this was a woman who had the talent, the depth, and the pedigree to really bring this character to life.”
A Thousand and One’s Inez is, like Taylor herself, a Harlem girl; as the film unfolds, we learn she is a product of the less admirable attributes of the historically Black neighborhood in NYC, notable for being the birthplace of lasting cultural movements including the Harlem Renaissance but also for persistent income inequality as the second-poorest neighborhood in Manhattan. Inez goes from the foster system to jail and then the street with little anchoring her other than her son, Terry. Even with her own life in disarray, Inez desperately clings to the boy with sporadic visits. The system being what it is, Inez’s instability makes legal guardianship all but impossible, so one day she does the unthinkable: She snatches him out of foster care, essentially raising him while hiding him in plain sight. A Thousand and One muses on a lot of themes, but most prevalent are the sacrifices mothers make and the struggles often unique to Black moms in particular.
“I think this film is a big eye-opener for anybody who has been misunderstood, with the things that we deal with and go through as mothers,” Taylor tells Shondaland. “Most importantly, it’s a love letter to all moms, especially single moms. This movie was eye-opening for me because I was able to fully understand all the sacrifices that my mom had made — all the sacrifices my aunts, my grandmother, all the women before me made.”
Noble as her intentions are, Inez is also hiding a big secret that’s revealed in the final third of the film — a secret so earth-shaking, it upends Terry’s perception of her and threatens to alter the audience’s perception of Inez too. While it of course won’t be revealed here, Inez’s secret nonetheless prompts the viewer to think more broadly about what motherhood means, how it’s defined, and what a “good mom” looks like.
There’s no real easy or neat answer, particularly since, up until then, we’ve only seen Inez give everything she had to give Terry a better life, even when she had nothing at all. Taylor is a solid, compelling actor in all the minutes leading up to the big revelation, but it’s when Inez’s secret is revealed that Taylor transforms into an entirely new character, someone whose inner turmoil turns beastly and maybe even a bit terrifying. She says that allowing herself to become that raw on-screen gave her permission to investigate the pain she and many other Black mothers experience but shove down in order to survive, in order to take care of families.
Teyana Taylor stars as Inez de la Paz and Aaron Kingsley Adetola stars as Terry in A.V. Rockwell’s A Thousand and One.
“Being able to pour in, to cry, to open up the eyes of everyone … [this movie] allowed me to [express] how Black women, especially moms, we’re not protected enough,” Taylor says. “We’re not cherished enough. We’re not appreciated enough. Mentally, emotionally, spiritually — we show up for everybody. It’s okay for us to be strong for everybody until it’s time for us to show up for ourselves.”
Another prominent theme is gentrification — a tidy word for a slow process that displaces people like Inez so gradually, it’s sometimes hard to see as it’s happening. A Thousand and One does a splendid if heartbreaking job of chronicling how somebody like Inez gets lost in a city’s rapid changes, as the film moves through a number of different NYC eras, from the pre-9/11 days until now. The way Inez becomes a kind of ghost in the city in real time, while she simultaneously deals with the stress of raising a Black boy and hiding this secret, is layered to make A Thousand and One a kind of time capsule, a lyrical poem in a city of 8 million stories.
Being from Harlem herself — having watched mom-and-pop stores get replaced by national chains, and residents get shoved out of the neighborhood their families lived in for generations — Taylor was able to inform Inez with that added layer of hurt and anxiety. Rockwell noticed it in auditions, sealing Taylor’s casting and ultimate phenomenal performance.
“I was writing a movie about a city that was one of one, a neighborhood that was one of one, and a group of women that needed to be celebrated,” says Rockwell. “I could see that [Taylor] represented something that was really important to me, which was feeling a truthful connection to this character. She knew this woman, or she was this woman at some point in her life. I felt her compassion. She stood out as a gem.”
A Thousand and One debuts in theaters on Friday, March 31.
Malcolm Venable is a Senior Staff Writer at Shondaland. Follow him on Twitter @malcolmvenable.
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