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| Yara Shahidi Illustration by Triunfo Arciniegas |
Yara Shahidi: ‘I’ll put my career on the line to talk politics’
The actor, model and activist is no ordinary 19-year-old. She’s filmed with Eddie Murphy and Angelina Jolie, she’s friends with Michelle Obama – and Oprah wants her to be a future US president
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| Top of her class: Yara Shahidi, on her way to Harvard. Photograph: Brian Guido |
Megan Nolan
Sunday 4 August 2019
When Yara Shahidi was a little girl, she ran out of history books to read at school. This was before she had starred opposite Eddie Murphy or Angelina Jolie, before her sitcom roles, when her show business career was limited to a few commercials and modelling gigs. She was six at the time. “I remember I was in one school programme where I finished all my history course material a month early,” she says. “So Mama got me a supplementary curriculum and started back with Mesopotamian history. Might as well go all the way, right?”
This kind of thing wasn’t out of the ordinary. “Like, my education was very intentional,” she says. Her parents carefully and deliberately curated her early reading, even fairy tales; she was encouraged to read as many diverse versions as they could find – not just the straightforward Cinderella, but Korean Cinderella, Persian Cinderella, Egyptian Cinderella. They encouraged autonomous learning. “That is why, I think, I’ve always loved learning. I had the freedom to read those political essays, to read dystopian novels.” She was devouring James Baldwin in her spare time at school by the time she was 13, she says. “My parents have always put me in environments that were intentionally progressive and forward-thinking.”
We’re meeting on a humid New York afternoon, at the tail end of a press junket. She’s here to promote The Sun Is Also A Star, a teen romance film, based on a young adult novel by Nicola Yoon, about immigration. She has been conducting interviews all day, and now her head is bowed a little. Her mother and her publicist sit off to the side, checking their phones, benevolently ignoring our conversation, except when Shahidi looks to her mother to confirm a fact or ask an opinion. Shahidi is sick – “Allergies,” she croaks apologetically – but within moments of a coughing fit she’s turned back to face me, no trace of discomfort on her face, spine straight, eyes sparkling, articulate, elegant responses flowing like she was born to do this – which in a way she was.
Shahidi is 19 and has been in entertainment for as long as she can remember. Her tight-knit family are all show-business-adjacent in some way or another. Her mother, Keri Salter Shahidi, was a commercial model. Her father, Iranian-American Afshin Shahidi is a photographer (one of his primary subjects was Prince). Both her younger brothers model and act.
Shahidi’s big break came in 2013, when she was cast as Zoey, the teenage daughter of the Johnson family, in the ABC sitcom Black-ish. “I was 13 when I auditioned,” she says, “and I remember having, like, the best time during that audition. I walked out and said, like, ‘I honestly don’t even need to book this,’ the audition was just a really good time.” Black-ish turned out to be a commercial and critical hit, a broad and big-hearted family show that also addressed complex issues about race and class in America. Shahidi’s Zoey, blasé and deadpan, pretty and popular, made a perfect foil to the show’s more serious themes.
In 2017, she starred in a spin-off show, Grown-ish, which charted Zoey’s transition to college life and gave Shahidi the room to tell new stories about black women in America. It was a transition she describes as “so much fun”, one that allowed her to grow “in terms of being able to tell it from a young woman’s perspective – a young woman of colour.”
Shahidi is pleasant and engaging for all of our conversation, if a little modulated in the way you might expect of someone who has probably had a publicist for more of her life than she hasn’t.
But she visibly comes to life when discussion of her work segues into the political. She has become as well regarded for her activism as her acting, attracting awestruck plaudits from Oprah – who says she is hoping she lives long enough to see Shahidi become president – and sitting on panels about the future of feminism with Michelle Obama.
An organisation she co-founded, Eighteen x 18, is apolitical – it encourages youth-voter engagement in general and is not party-specific – but Shahidi’s own views are unapologetically leftist. She donated to Colin Kaepernick’sfund. She is a vocal supporter of Black Lives Matter. She takes the time, unlike many tokenistic liberals, to cite and highlight the work of those marginalised communities she learns from. She has appeared on panels promoting prison abolition. She was also one of the people who came out to support Jussie Smollett, the Empire actor who alleged he was beaten in a homophobic and racist attack, though she may well regret having done so now that he is thought to have faked the attack in a bizarre publicity stunt. Even if being vaguely progressive is now the celebrity norm, by Hollywood standards Shahidi is practically a radical.
It wasn’t so long ago that celebrities who wore their politics proudly, who tried to incorporate them into their entertainment career, were near-universally dismissed as mortifying. Even when they were doing something unimpeachable – Sean Penn providing water aid to Haiti, say – there still seemed something, well, icky about it. At the Oscars in 2003, the documentarian Michael Moore was booed with alarming vitriol when he accepted his award with a speech criticising the Republican presidency. Nowadays, to not criticise Trump at least indirectly is starting to look remiss.
There are, of course, plenty of celebrities whose political engagement is still bone-chillingly embarrassing. But there is also a generation of entertainers who seem to have no relationship to that clunky public announcement-style politics of old. People such as Amandla Stenberg, the non-binary actor who starred in The Hate U Give. Or Donald Glover, or Willow Smith, or Indya Moore, the transgender star of Pose, whose values don’t seem separate from what they do or say in their careers and personal lives. They feel a million miles away from Leo DiCaprio, famous for dating young women and vlogging lectures about climate change from his private island.
Shahidi’s Iranian-American family home, she explains, always instilled these kind of humanitarian, community-minded values, so it didn’t come as a shock to her when she was being asked about politics in the international press as a young teenager. “It’s not as though I wasn’t political before I was on my first panel,” she says. “These conversations were already happening in my home.” About fame she says, “The thing I’ve appreciated the most is, in any other context, a 13-year-old would not have been asked about the political state of America, and been taken seriously.”
For someone like Shahidi, it would be much easier to be intentionally bland, popping up the odd Happy Pride tweet and celebrating #BlackGirlMagicevery now and again. In a broader sense, there is something powerful about black entertainers refusing to be content with simply cashing a cheque and implicitly accepting a racist system that pays them but punishes their peers. They are refusing the expectation that if you are a beautiful woman, you should just stay quiet and smile; if you are a black entertainer, you should be grateful just to be let into the room. And they are aware of the long history of their predecessors who made similar refusals and were harshly punished for it.
“I come from a lineage of entertainers who put their careers on the line to speak about politics,” Shahidi says. “And that’s the only reason I can have this space. I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for the Harry Belafontes and Eartha Kitts, the Sidney Poitiers and many others who jeopardised their careers and combined their art with their activism. I feel an immense privilege to be able to do the same.”
She was politicised, she says, when she began reading Baldwin and ZoraNeale Hurston while a student in her Catholic high school, two writers who became the guiding lights of her self-education. Then she became, in the nicest of ways, a huge nerd. When I ask what young adult fiction she read when she was younger she has to eventually concede that she was too busy reading Vonnegut and Huxley. I ask what her habits are, and she tells me that she isn’t great at taking care of herself.
Her mother pipes up immediately. “You’ll call to tell me about a book while you should be sleeping! You will sacrifice food and sleep to read a book on anything in the socio-political realm.”
“When I called you then I was laughing so hard,” Shahidi replies, “because I caught myself making such loud verbal noises when something I was reading hit home. I was sitting there shouting: ‘Oh, yes. Oh!’ by myself.”
Throughout our conversation, Shahidi glances towards her mother, catching her eye when she says something self-deprecating, trying (successfully) to make her smile. Shahidi describes her mother as her best friend.
She tells me she loves listening to NPR podcasts, because they “contextualise very large existential questions”. When do you listen to those, I ask. While you’re exercising? She laughs – really laughs, for the first time – and looks back towards her mother who is shaking her head with wry disapproval.
“No. My goal is that next time you talk to me, that is what I do while I’m listening to a podcast, sweating. Because I don’t do any right now.”
Pictures on her Instagram of her getting her makeup done while trying to devour more theory back up the impression of a woman devoted to knowledge, as, more to the point, does her 2018 admission to Harvard. Michelle Obama wrote her letter of recommendation. Harvard is the one subject a publicist asked me not to bring up during our conversation. Hollywood is one thing, but you can understand why she doesn’t want fellow students at America’s most prestigious university giving her side-eye for special treatment, no matter how genuinely earned her entrance was.
I ask how it feels when she is described as the voice of a generation, as she regularly is in profiles. “I read that and think it’s physically not possible,” she responds, looking away. “I am beyond proud of being a part of a generation that no one person could be the face of. I’m grateful to be one of many voices.”
What does she think about the politics of her new film, which deals with immigration so intimately within its romance narrative? “There’s no trivialising of the deportation. There’s a deep humanising of that experience, and I think the love story helps with that humanising. Being from a family defined by immigration myself, even though I can’t claim the particulars of Natasha’s story, I did my best to portray the gravity that I know is real – not only because of my own family story, but because of the stories of my friends.”
She talks a little about the movie and how important it was to her that her character didn’t change herself for love. “The most disheartening movie I’ve ever seen was Grease,” she tells me, “because I had always seen that one scene where she was in the latex body suit and assumed it was the middle of the movie. You know? And that she got to be herself eventually. Then I watched the whole thing and was like, really? She gets a makeover and comes out smoking and gets the guy and that’s where it ends?”
She’s proud of pursuing her interests and not allowing acting to overtake them, so what has she got still on her list? Is there anything she hasn’t turned her hand to yet? Writing, it seems to me, would be a natural diversion for someone as curious as her, and she confirms that she’s got a laptop full of poetry which has been temporarily stalled because of water damage. She’s cultivating an interest in music production, and says she’s never happier than when listening to a song. She’s inspired by her musician friends who are “killing the game” and wants to know how exactly they do it.
But at the moment, she’s exactly where she wants to be. Her perfect day is one at the beach with her family, and music, and a Korean barbecue at the end.
“I think we as a family walked into this career knowing that Hollywood is just a place. It’s not going anywhere. My parents have always said that acting is something we do, but not who we are.”
The Sun Is Also a Star is in cinemas nationwide from 9 August
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