Teyana Taylor is opening up about her own experience with postpartum depression, which came in handy for her role in One Battle After Another.
Teyana had to “go down a rabbit hole” to understand how people experience postpartum depression differently.
The actress and singer, who shares two daughters Rue, 5, and Iman “Junie” Tayla, 10, with ex Iman Shumpert, plays Black revolutionary Perfidia who is the former leader of the radical group the French 75.
Perfidia has an affair with both Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Steven Lockjaw (Sean Penn) and welcomes a daughter with the former.
“How I may have handled my postpartum depression is not how the next woman has handled hers,” Taylor, 35, told 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,” she explained.
Taylor understood that how Perfidia handled her postpartum depression experience “was the result of feeling unheard, unseen, not beautiful and like a piece of meat.”
“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,'” said the All’s Fair star. “But who are we to judge how she handles postpartum depression after being ignored?”