LOS ANGELES – By the time Harvard students grow bored stealing glances at freshman Malia Obama, they'll have a new classmate to obsess over, a friend of the former first family with arguably even greater star power.
Minnesota native Yara Shahidi won't move into the Cambridge, Mass., dorms until next fall, though. She's taking a gap year to headline a spinoff of her ABC series "Black-ish," in which her character, Zoey Johnson, heads to college herself.
Zoey is far less ambitious than the actress who plays her.
"Oftentimes I'm developing two characters at the same time, figuring out who Yara is and who Zoey is," Shahidi said from the Disney Studios, where she's sprinting back and forth between the sets of the Emmy-nominated "Black-ish," which returns Tuesday, and her new show "Grown-ish," tentatively scheduled to premiere in January on cable's Freeform.
"How do you make that separation, and embrace this idea that your character is not going to agree with you but still has a valid point of view? It's been actually kind of fantastic," she added before slipping in a reference to the rebellious teen in "The Catcher in the Rye," a novel she first read when she was 14. "I kind of see Zoey as my personal-life Holden Caulfield, because you're allowed to be somebody that you're not. As a teenager you really don't have that privilege in many other spaces."
Even if her new series flunks out with viewers, Shahidi's future shines bright.
Michelle Obama was so impressed by the young star's contributions to her Let Girls Learn Initiative that she wrote Shahidi a college recommendation letter.
The accolades — a BET Award, an invitation to speak at a United Nations summit, an Essence Magazine Women in Hollywood Award — have come largely from her political activism rather than her acting ability. In August, she was recognized at a Black Girls Rock ceremony alongside Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., and Wall Street power broker Suzanne Shank.