‘Black-ish’ Alums Yara Shahidi and Marcus Scribner on How ‘Grown-ish’ Will Now Focus on Junior

variety.com:

Selome Hailu Gearing up for the final episodes of ABC’s “Black-ish,” 22-year-old Marcus Scribner was happy with his performance in the long-running hit sitcom.“I was ready to move on from the character,” says Scribner, who was 14 when “Black-ish” debuted, with Anthony Anderson and Tracee Ellis Ross in the leading roles as Andre and Rainbow Johnson. “But they were like, ‘Hold on one minute.

Slow your roll.’”Late in Season 8, Scribner was approached with a new opportunity. Yara Shahidi had just finished four seasons on “Grown-ish,” Freeform’s college-set “Black-ish” spinoff, and while there was more left for her character, eldest daughter Zoey, to do on the show, she was ready to step back as the main star and focus more on her role as an executive producer.

Her first order of business: to pass the torch to her on-screen sibling. “I cannot take full credit … but I have been pitching the idea of Marcus joining us on ‘Grown-ish’ since Season 1,” says Shahidi, also 22. “We basically grew up together on ‘Black-ish,’ and it made so much sense, because his college journey was abandoned so quickly.”During the later seasons of “Black-ish,” his character, Junior, dropped out of Howard University and moved in and out of his parents’ house while working odd jobs before finally deciding to give higher education another shot.

Much of that storyline focused on the parents, who ultimately learned to let Junior make his own mistakes. But on “Grown-ish,” those mistakes will come under a compassionate microscope.“We’re able to focus much more on his inner workings and see exactly what makes the character tick,” Scribner says. “He’s always been very loving and gullible, and that has much to do with being the exact opposite of his father..