Girl Meets World

YARA SHAHIDI HAS A LOT ON HER PLATE— AND ON HER MIND. CARINA CHOCANO SITS DOWN WITH THE TEENAGE DYNAMO. PHOTOGRAPHED BY ALESSANDRA SANGUINETTI.

 Yara Shahidi says she’s nothing like Zoey Johnson, the character she plays on Grown-ish. “Quite honestly, I’m a square,” she tells me one recent sunny morning at a café in Pasadena. “There are a lot of story lines on the show that just wouldn’t have been touched had we gone by ‘You know what? Zoey has this strict code of ethics.’ ” Shahidi certainly doesn’t look square. In Joe’s jeans and a royal-blue Tory Burch track jacket and shoes, her curly bob pulled away from her luminous face, she is at once impeccably composed and casual in a way that can’t be all that casual. Yes, she has arrived with her mom, but they are famously close, and Shahidi is still young.

Eighteen, to be exact—though she’s already accomplished more than most people do in a lifetime. Her breakout role on the hit ABC sitcom Blackish led to the spin-off Grown-ish on Freeform, which starts shooting its second season early next year (she serves as producer as well as star). She has discussed political activism with Hillary Clinton and Oprah Winfrey, is a brand ambassador for Chanel, and started a voting guide for young people called Eighteen x ’18. She graduated last year from the Dwight School in New York, having received acceptance letters from every college she applied to, and will start at Harvard in the fall. She can tell you the year she becomes eligible to run for president off the top of her head.