Junglepussy recently opened up about how she scored her role in Paul Thomas Anderson’s critically acclaimed action drama One Battle After Another — and it turns out her music played a major part.
In an interview with IndieWire, the rapper, whose real name is Shayna McHayle, revealed that Anderson personally sought her out after discovering her work. The director first became aware of Junglepussy when she toured with Tame Impala back in 2022.
“My agent reached out to me like, ‘Paul Thomas Anderson wants your number. Can I give it to him? He wants to talk to you directly,’” she recalled. “I was like, ‘Who? OK, yeah, give him my number.’”
Over the years, Junglepussy and Paul Thomas Anderson occasionally met up in New York City, where the filmmaker eventually told her he was writing a role specifically for her.
“I didn’t know that it was like Junglepussy for real until it really got close to locking in,” she said. “He gave me a hard copy of the script, and when I read it, I was like, ‘What the…? What is this?’ When I saw my name in there, and I saw my lyrics in there, and I just saw all these pussy references, I was gagged.”
In One Battle After Another, Junglepussy plays a member of the revolutionary group the French 75 and reunites with Regina Hall, her co-star from the 2018 comedy-drama Support the Girls.
“Because [Anderson] reached out to me directly and was so inspired by my music — even ‘This pussy don’t pop for you,’ having it like as a sign in the movie, which is how I’ve been performing it for the past decade — I knew there were a lot of things that he was drawn to, and I wanted to keep that part of me alive in the role,” she explained. “But I also wanted to do some things that I wouldn’t usually do, like shooting a machine gun out of a moving vehicle, like robbing a bank.”
One Battle After Another has been met with widespread praise since its release last month, pulling in $22 million during its opening weekend and taking the top spot at the box office.
