Inside Harry Styles’ new love Taylor Russell’s rise to fame from job at butcher’s aged 13 to 4-year wait for first role
SHE is the new girl Directioners love to hate, now Harry Styles has shown how serious he is about Taylor Russell by jetting to the Caribbean with his new love.
And not only has the 29-year-old super-cool Canadian actress bagged one of the world’s most eligible bachelors, but her career is on the up too.
Having played the lead in acclaimed film Bones And All last year, she has just conquered the stage at the National Theatre in London, where she starred opposite Paapa Essiedu in The Effect to rave reviews.
And she admitted it “feels like home” in the UK’s capital, alluding to her relationship with Harry making her feel “very ignited” for the first time in years.
But life has not always been as breezy for the actress and model, who endured racism and hard graft while growing up.
Taylor’s family faced financial struggles and relied on benefits to get by.
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To support her father’s career, it meant they were all forced to relocate 16 times, around Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal, before she eventually started acting.
And with a black father of Jamaican descent and white mum, Taylor recalls feeling unaccepted by her peers due to her skin colour.
“I grew up in Vancouver, which is beautiful but very Caucasian,” she told news outlet The Grio.
“When I moved to Toronto there were a lot more black and mixed people.
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“I have always had people who wanted to touch my hair and black girls not accepting me because I’m too light-skinned to fit in with them and white girls who rejected me because I was different than them too.
“A lot of identity issues come from that and I dealt with identity issues growing up because I didn’t grow up with my dad’s side of the family.
"My dad is black and my mum is white and we grew up mostly with her side.”
Even from as young as six, Taylor was trying to figure out a way of leaving Canada, and she has said she “always had these dreams of living in London”.
She told Dazed magazine: “I remember being six, sitting awake in the middle of the night and saying to myself, ‘This isn’t my life, my life is something else’.
“It’s not because things were necessarily good or bad.
"It was just that I felt this constant sense of displacement, this feeling that I wasn’t where I was meant to be.”
Taylor took up many different creative passions, including ballet and painting, and earned her success the hard way.
Far from being a Hollywood nepo-baby, handed success, she began working at the age of 13 in various places over five years including restaurants, a jewellery store, a butcher’s and Amazon warehouses — earning and saving so she could pursue her passions.
“I was more like a mum,” she says.
It was after graduating high school at the age of 18, when Taylor decided to sign up for an acting class, that she fell in love with drama.
Landing an agent soon after, she bought a Toyota Yaris with the money she saved and would regularly make the 20-hour trek from Vancouver, where she was living at the time, to Los Angeles to go on auditions for as long as she could afford to do so.
When she could no longer sustain herself, she drove back to Vancouver, got another job and started saving all over again.
“It was four years before anything happened,” she says.
Taylor’s first major TV appearance was in The Unauthorized Saved By The Bell Story, on US channel Lifetime, in 2014, in which she played Lark Voorhies.
But it was her starring role as Judy Robinson in the science-fiction series Lost In Space, a Netflix remake of the original 1965 series, which really got her recognition, earning her a Saturn Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress in a Streaming Presentation.
Having faced racism in Hollywood, been told she was “too tropical” and had producers pick up on her afro hair, Taylor was extremely proud of the fact she had been able to represent black women in the sci-fi show, which ran from 2018 to 2021.
She says: “Because we’re in space and in sci-fi and in worlds where there aren’t labels of what black girls should and shouldn’t be, because there are no stereotypes of being ‘sassy’ or whatever box society puts us in now, we have this beautiful space where we’re able to be anything.
“It’s a huge honour for me and I don’t take it lightly. It holds a really big place in my heart.”
In 2019, she played Steve Coogan’s niece in the comedy Hot Air.
For Taylor though, her biggest achievement, to date, is performing in British playwright Lucy Prebble’s The Effect at the National Theatre.
In the play, which ended last month, Taylor and The Capture star Paapa played volunteers who fall in love while in a clinical drug trial.
Despite the great reception, she confesses she felt very out of her depth.
She says: “I’m not British and I haven’t . . . I mean, I’m not trained at all, which is not something that I feel pride in. I feel very self-conscious about that.”
But a message from her aunt made her realise why she has become such a success.
‘I feel at peace’
Recalling a time when she tried to play the bass guitar as a child, Taylor says: “She was telling me this story and was like, ‘And then you got up in front of the class and you couldn’t play it the way you thought you could, but the thing is you believed that you could so much.
"'I guess it speaks to some part of you. You go and do something because you believe you can do it’.
“I was thinking it was quite a demented thing about me, like there’s something missing in my brain where I think, ‘Oh, I can do this’.
“So, I don’t know, I’m not like, ‘Oh yeah, it’s amazing that I just do all of these things’.
"But I kind of just do them because I believe I can, and there’s no basis (for thinking) if I actually can or not. I just decide that I will.”
It may be that Taylor also simply believed she would have a relationship with One Direction star Harry, 29, who she has been dating since June.
She is one in a long line of beautiful women he has dated, including the late Caroline Flack, Kendall Jenner, Taylor Swift and Camille Rowe.
His most serious relationship was with Olivia Wilde, ten years his senior, who he dated from January 2021 to November last year, after they met on the set of the film, Don’t Worry, Darling.
As for Taylor, aside from a fling last year with Call Me By Your Name actor Timothee Chalamet and a 2018 romance with Boy Erased star Lucas Hedges, she has been largely single, and had been left feeling a tad cynical about love.
She said: “My experience the past couple of years, (with) people I’ve really trusted, things weren’t held in a way that I would’ve appreciated them to be held.
"And so, that has changed things in me a little bit.”
But she has not completely lost faith in love, recently confessing she finds it “like a drug, it makes you feel insane”.
And it seemed all the theatre star needed to change her mindset was a change in scenery.
Describing her outlook when she first got to London in the summer ahead of her play, she says: “When I came here I was like, ‘You know what, Taylor, this is a new place.
"You’re not in America, not in Canada. You have to open up and allow people to know you.
“‘If something happens, something happens, that’s life.
"The tax on a real relationship is the reality that you will get hurt, you will have grief, something will be lost at some point and that’s OK. It’s worth it’.”
And now, with her romance with Harry heat-ing up, many wonder if she was alluding to the Adore You singer when she opened up in August about finally feeling at peace.
She said: “I hadn’t really felt at home any- where I’ve lived fully.
“In New York I felt the most, probably out of anywhere in the world.
“Now I feel that here. I feel at peace in a lot of ways.
“I feel there were parts of my life that were dormant that now feel very ignited, which haven’t for years and years and years.
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"I know I’m being vague with what I’m saying.”
I bet Harry won’t complain.
