Last year, that business also meant a return to music. In August 2025, Taylor released Escape Room, which earned her her first Grammy nomination, for best R&B album. Between interludes from a slew of famous friends—including Henson, Nash Betts, Issa Rae, and Jodie Turner-Smith— Taylor works through heartbreak in the wake from her divorce from former NBA player Iman Shumpert, to whom she was married from 2016 until 2023. When we spoke in October, Taylor admitted that their relationship still influences how she thinks about future romantic partnerships. “Divorce, to me, is you’re grieving the death of a living being,” she says. “I think once children are involved, you understand the importance of really still having to show up for each other. At least for the next 18 years, and being the best co-parents that we can be.” But she maintains that she doesn’t “want people to start feeling scared of marriage, because marriage is a beautiful thing.”
For “Escape Room,” she also released a “visual album” — a short film starring Lakeith Stanfield and Aaron Pierre, who she announced that she was dating in June on Instagram. The pair were first spotted together last February at the Fifteen Percent Pledge Gala, seven months after she finalized her divorce. “I think we’re both working our asses off and doing what we gotta do, and that’s amazing,” she told me when we met. But in late December, rumors that she had split with Pierre surfaced in tabloids. Taylor and Pierre have not commented publicly on their relationship status, but Taylor has an enduringly optimistic view on love and commitment. “One thing I don’t do is rewrite history,” she told me, speaking at the time about Shumpert, but in ways that remain relevant in the face of a fresh breakup. “When I love, my love is real. So whatever you’ve seen was a real display of love until there was no more. And that’s okay.”
Taylor is learning a lot from this whirlwind year about the craft of acting onscreen and the performances that a press tour necessitates off-screen. She’s spent a lot of time with her costars on set and in interviews and has noticed some differences working with some of Hollywood’s legendary men versus the women of All’s Fair.
“It’s always been like, big brother energy. Like they are not playing about me or any of the women on set. So that’s always fun. But that energy is also so protective: ‘Wait, no, no. Make sure you get her this. No, no, don’t let her walk in that puddle.’ It’s like, I got this, big bro. Love you. Thank you,” she says, both appreciating and bristling against that sort of protection.
“When you’re on set with all girls, you have the group chat, and it’s like, chatty, and we’re just having a ball, and it was like, ‘Oh my God, does anybody have this? Oh my God, Kim, I need you to call over to Skims. I need a bra ASAP.’ Our group chat is just so lit. And it’s a sisterhood. You get to share more, whereas with your brothers, it’s just like, Why tell my brother right now what I am going through? They’re gonna be like, ‘Who did it, where they at?’”