Teyana Taylor Says She’s ‘Nervous’ but ‘Super Excited’ About Playing Dionne Warwick in Biopic (Exclusive)

Teyana Taylor wants her performance as Dionne Warwick to be “perfect” as she prepares for what she’s referring to as a “big job.”

While attending the Fourth Annual Fifteen Percent Pledge Gala in Los Angeles on Saturday, Feb. 1, the 34-year-old musician and actress told PEOPLE that “everything is so up and running” in pre-production as she readies her role as the music superstar, 84, in a forthcoming biopic.

Taylor first revealed in an early 2023 interview that she was, at that time, in the “building process” of a biopic based on the “Walk on By” vocalist’s life. Since then, Warwick has filled fans in on the project by explaining how Taylor — who she said was a “triple threat” in an October 2024 interview with the Associated Press — had been doing “all the research she can find on me” to prepare for the role.

And on Saturday, Taylor caught up with PEOPLE at the Fifteen Percent Pledge Gala, which celebrates Black businesses and their founders, about where the project currently stands in pre-production.

“We have everything kind of set in stone and everything together. It was a little slowdown, of course, with the unfortunate things that have taken place. But everything is so up and running,” Taylor says. “It’s still going and Ms. Dionne has so much career. So even trying to consolidate… I just want it to be perfect.”

“I want this to be perfect and I want to sell her story and I just want everything to be perfect,” she adds. “But I’m in such a great space with it. We’re in a great space. We spend a lot of time together. So it’s just like, I’m super excited. It’s a big job. It’s a big job.”

As the “Gonna Love Me” singer explains, while she’s “nervous even talking about” the biopic, she and the others behind it have made it a “safe space” to create.

“She feels so safe and that has been the most important thing for me,” Taylor says of Warwick. “Her safety, mentally, emotionally, everything.”

She continues, “So I think that’s another reason why I took a little while because I needed to make sure it was in the right hands. She’s given me a lot of control, like a lot of creative control, so I’m taking on even a bigger job than just portraying her.”

“I have a lot of production work, directing work to do, a lot of different things like that so I’m just really making sure everything is perfect,” Taylor adds.

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The multi-hyphenate most recently appeared in films including 2023’s White Men Can’t Jump and The Book of Clarence.

In an April 2023 appearance on The Tamron Hall show, Taylor referenced Angela Bassett’s performance as Tina Turner in 1993’s What’s Love Got to Do with It and Jamie Foxx’s role as Ray Charles in 2004’s Ray, said that she missed “when movies were like that, when you really get to know them and tap in.”

“I’ve always been a firm believer and always just stood on safety, you know what I’m saying? She’s had a wonderful career, you know, and I think right now is about making her feel as safe as possible,” Taylor said. “To be able to tell her story — because a lot of these stories get misconstrued or extremely dramatized to an extent, and that’s not like where we really want to go.”

The biopic news followed a December 2020 post on X from Warwick, who wrote that Taylor would “obviously” play her in a film. In January 2024, Taylor wrote on Instagram, following a post from Warwick’s son, producer Damon Elliott, that she’ll be telling the “iconic story” of Warwick with her production company, The Aunties Production.

Speaking with reporters at a 2024 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Induction event months later, Warwick said she “got to know” Taylor and has seen her films, per footage from the Associated Press.

“As I got to know her, I found that she was doing all of the research that she could find on me,” Warwick said. “And I also [found out that] she knows more about me than I know about myself. But I think she’s gonna be the one.”

“And I personally chose her based on a couple of photographs that my son found, one of her and one of me,” she added. “And we had them interposed together. I can’t think of anybody else that could ever do it.”