… Catch A Rising Star?

Hollywood’s most promising young talent, Yara Shahidi, is refreshingly candid when it comes to her activism.

- Chloe Malle

YARA SHAHIDI shimmers. Her fingernails are painted a pale iridescence that catches the light of the fixtures overhead as she gesticulates exuberantly while explaining the importance of “intentional intersectionality”. But it goes beyond makeup — she seems to glow from the inside. We’re in New York’s Crosby Bar on a rainy afternoon and the 19-year-old actor has just come from a luncheon at which she presented an award to Taraji P. Henson.

Yara entered the cultural lexicon at 14, playing Zoey Johnson on the US sitcom Black-ish, but she cemented her position there offscreen by speaking out on issues of social justice. The first word used to describe her is as often ‘activist’ as ‘actor’, and no less an eminence than Oprah Winfrey has said she hopes she is still alive when Yara becomes US president, because “that is going to happen if she wants it to happen”. (For her part, Yara says she would prefer to remain “policy adjacent”.) For her 18th birthday she hosted a voting party, with a registration booth, and launched a national initiative called Eighteen x 18 to galvanise young people to vote, a project she continues to focus on. “With midterms coming up it was, of course, our priority,” she says. “But now it’s about impressing upon people that there’s no such thing as an off-year.”

That’s as true for Yara herself as it is for anyone else. In addition to starring in her own spin-off series, Grown-ish, which follows Zoey as she navigates university life, Yara is a student at Harvard (Michelle Obama wrote her a recommendation letter), with plans to study anthropology, history and economics. Her first starring film role, an adaptation of the YA novel The Sun Is Also a Star, is out now, and with her family she has started a production company, Seventh Sun.