Taylour Paige
Taylour Paige is an actor, born 1990.
Paige's first long job was Hit the Floor, the VH1 sports drama she led as Ahsha Hayes from 2013. That is a decent training ground and a hard label to get off. She got off it through independent film, first with Jean of the Joneses and then as Cathy Volsan in White Boy Rick in 2018, parts small enough that casting directors noticed and audiences largely did not.
Zola settled the question. She has the title role in a black comedy crime film and won the Independent Spirit Award for Best Female Lead for it. The performance works because Paige plays her as the only sane person in the car, an unbroken act of appraisal, letting the film go lurid around a completely level gaze. Very little of it is dialogue. Most of it is a look held two beats longer than comfort allows.
Dussie Mae in Ma Rainey's Black Bottom asked for the opposite skill, a supporting turn in a chamber piece where every character is performing for somebody else in the room. Since then the work has spread wide: Eleanor in Boogie, Treina in Sharp Stick, Jane Saunders in Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F in 2024, Charlotte Hanlon in the HBO series IT: Welcome to Derry. The pattern is an actor who keeps picking filmmakers over franchises and then takes the franchise job anyway, which is a sensible way to keep working.
Movies (12)
TV (4)
Where to start with Taylour Paige
Everything routes through Zola, and it is not a difficult call. Watch it for what she does with silence, because the film is loud and frantic around her while the performance stays absolutely still and keeps assessing everyone in the frame.
Ma Rainey's Black Bottom is the useful contrast, a stage adaptation where she has to hold her own in a room of very large performances and does it by underplaying. White Boy Rick is the earlier work that got her noticed, and Hit the Floor is the television years, worth a look mainly to see how far she has travelled.
For the recent stuff, Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F is the fun studio job, IT: Welcome to Derry is the prestige horror series, Boogie gives her a warm supporting role, and Sharp Stick is the strangest thing on the list by some distance.