In one scene in Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, Teyana Taylor’s character, Perfidia Beverly Hills, is more focused on seducing Leonardo DiCaprio’s Bob Ferguson (then still known as “Ghetto Pat”) than on the bomb exploding just feet away from them. In another scene, she holds Sean Penn’s Steven J Lockjaw at gunpoint while simultaneously provoking an erection. These are some of the perceived brazen, morally slippery choices Perfidia makes that have unsettled some viewers since the movie’s premiere.
“I absolutely hate what this means for the representation of Black women in Hollywood,” YouTuber and cultural commentator Jouelzy said in a video posted a day after Taylor won the Golden Globe award for best supporting actress. “So often the institutional powers that be only reward us for portrayals that are stereotypical characters of Black women. One Battle After Another was such an offensive film.”
Jouelzy’s critique reflects one strand of the debate that has followed the film since its September premiere and intensified after Taylor’s Golden Globe win. Perfidia appears for roughly 35 minutes in the three-hour film, but her presence looms large in the story and in the conversation around it. Across TikTok and YouTube, thousands of videos dissect the character’s behaviour and symbolism.
The debate surrounding Perfidia has reopened a familiar faultline in conversations about representation. When Black women play characters who are selfish, manipulative or morally ambiguous, the reaction often extends beyond the performance itself and into questions about what those portrayals mean for the image of Black women on screen and off.
Recent television and film has offered several morally complicated Black female protagonists. Harper Stern in Industry is ruthlessly ambitious; Tashi Duncan in Challengers is manipulative and calculating; Pansy Deacon from Hard Truths is so consumed by irritation and trauma that she lashes out at nearly everyone around her; Annalise Keating in How to Get Away With Murder and Olivia Pope in Scandal operate in ethically grey territory. In Nia DaCosta’s Hedda, the famously destructive Hedda Gabler is also played by a Black woman. For media scholars and entertainment industry observers, the intensity of these debates suggests the range of moral possibilities afforded to Black female characters onscreen may still be narrower than for many of their peers.
Several interpretations have emerged, ranging from historical overcorrection to deeper discomfort with seeing Black women portrayed as flawed or sexually autonomous. Some industry observers say the intensity of the reaction is partly rooted in a long and painful history. For much of Hollywood’s existence, Black characters were written through racist caricatures that reinforced harmful stereotypes and were used to justify false narratives about Black life.
“We as Black women feel a sense of trigger when we see certain characters on screen, and it can make us feel like our presence is flattened,” Jamila Bell, a writer, content creator, and actress who appeared in Tubi’s comedy Safe Space said.
For Kyndall Cunningham, a culture writer at Vox, part of the reaction reflects a broader discomfort with seeing Black women depicted in ways that challenge traditional expectations. “I think for some people there’s a personal racial insecurity in terms of just not feeling good seeing Black women played in a sort of unflattering light, or in a light that’s human,” she said. “People aren’t always comfortable seeing Black women portrayed as overtly sexual, flawed, selfish, or non-maternal.”
Cornell University professor Kristen Warner, who studies racial representation in media, says part of the reaction comes from a longstanding framework that divides portrayals of Black characters into “positive” and “negative” representation. That framework, she says, is rooted in assimilationist politics dating back to the 1960s and 1970s, when respectability was often framed as a strategy for social mobility. “There’s this idea that if we put our best selves forward, we’ll be treated better,” Warner said. “So representation gets evaluated through that lens of good versus bad.”
In practice, Warner says, “positive” portrayals often become shorthand for status or occupation. Characters such as Keating, Pope and Stern may be morally complicated, but their prestigious careers as a lawyer, fixer and finance professional signal success. “When we rely on that kind of binary, it doesn’t allow for the complexity of characterisation,” Warner said. Tony Soprano and Walter White are criminals capable of violence, yet their inner lives and moral conflicts are treated as rich dramatic terrain. But when it comes to Black women, the pressure to represent something larger than themselves can make that kind of messiness harder to accept,” she said. “If you’re looking for ‘she’s a princess’, or ‘she’s a witch’. What if it’s combined? Because humanity is messy and people are messy, so what if you actually were to let these people be in the fullness of what they are.”
That tension becomes even more pronounced with a character’s sexuality. For some viewers, Perfidia’s overt sexual confidence echoes a much older stereotype, the “Jezebel” trope, that has shaped the portrayal of Black women in American media for centuries. Taylor, however, interprets the character differently. In a recent Vanity Fair cover story, she pushed back on the idea that Perfidia is simply an object of sexualisation. “Another person interviewed me and mentioned something about Perfidia and how people felt like she was overly horny,” Taylor recalled. “And I’m like, do you realise the first thing we see of Perfidia is her having a gun to a guy’s head and he calls her sweet thing? Are we watching the same film? Perfidia kind of dived into the, ‘Oh, you think I’m hot? All right, bet. Cool if I get to still do what I’m doing, all I gotta do is show you a little titty or something.’”
Online, some commenters framed Taylor’s Globes win as a milestone, comparing it to Halle Berry’s Oscar for Monster’s Ball, in which Berry has sex with a white man. The implication circulating across social media was that major awards bodies tend to reward Black actors when their characters endure suffering, humiliation, or are morally degrading. Some agreed with this sentiment, while others cautioned that the system may be less specific to Black performers than to awards culture more broadly. Warner said dramatic roles involving emotional intensity, moral crisis, or personal collapse have long dominated acting categories across the industry.
“Hollywood tends to reward what they think showcases the best and the worst of humanity,” she said. “It rewards heavy performances. I understand the feeling we can’t ever just win for being joyous, but I would argue you’d be hard pressed to find performances that are awarded generally to just regular people being happy.”
Bell said range also means acknowledging the variety of personalities that exist within Black communities themselves. If multiple Black female characters appear in the same story, she explained, they should not all occupy the same narrative function. “They should explore different ideas,” she said. “A character can be strong without that being her only trait. She can be sexual without that being the only thing about her.
Cunningham says the conversation ultimately returns to a simpler point that fictional characters are meant to reflect the messiness of real life. “We all know Black women who are annoying or frustrating or problematic,” she said. “So we shouldn’t be clutching our pearls when we see that represented on screen.”
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