Teyana Taylor stopped by The Tonight Show on the heels of her big Golden Globe win for One Battle After Another. Not only did Taylor perform her song “Hard Part” with Lucky Daye, but she also sat down with host Jimmy Fallon to discuss the Globes experience, including her co-star Leonardo DiCaprio‘s viral moment.
Fallon played a clip of DiCaprio from the night, in which he was filmed animatedly speaking to someone about KPop Demon Hunters. The video has circulated wildly since Sunday and Taylor noted that some people, including herself, have assumed he was speaking to her.
“He is so funny,” Fallon said. “Who is he talking to? Can you tell us?”
“Okay, look, yesterday I thought I broke the Da Vinci Code, right?” Taylor replied. “They was like, ‘Yeah, so he was talking to Teyana.’ Now, KPop Demon Hunters won and my kids’ favorite song is ‘Golden,’ so I was really excited.”
Because of that she assumed DiCaprio was caught on camera talking to her. “But then I watched it and they were doing, like, the lip-read thing,” she added. “And I had to call Leo. I knew exactly what K-Pop was because Chase [Infiniti] taught me. So I was like, ‘You can’t be talking to me. Were you talking to me? Because I already told people you was talking to me.’”
She confirmed, “So, apparently, he had two KPop Demon Hunter conversations that night. So KPop Demon Hunters was just in his mouth all night… So I had a little friendly jealousy.” Ultimately, though, she said DiCaprio doesn’t “even remember who he was talking to.”
Taylor also discussed her acceptance speech, which was one of the top moments of the night. She noted that she cut an entire paragraph from her planned speech because she was nervous about running out of time. “I was trying to beat the embarrassment,” she said. “I was like, ‘If this music starts playing on me, I am going to melt on this stage.’”
Taylor joined forces with Lucky Daye to perform “Hard Part,” which appears on her Grammy-nominated album Escape Room. The album, which dropped in August, marked her fourth studio effort and her first since retiring from music in 2020. In a review, Rolling Stone called the LP “Taylor’s most vulnerable work yet,” adding that it “chronicles the process of navigating grief, trauma, acceptance, and new beginnings.”
