Marsai Martin Is Making Big-Time, Big-Screen Moves
Four years ago, a 10-year-old girl marched into Universal Studios’ headquarters wearing a green oral blazer, her hair slicked back into a she-means-business bun. Marsai Martin had an idea. “I was feeling fresh, to be honest,” says the actress, now 14. She had just wrapped her first season of ABC’s Peabody-winning sitcom Black-ish, in which she plays the Johnson family’s brainiac youngest daughter, Diane. At Martin’s side was series creator Kenya Barris. Earlier that day, they’d calmed their nerves and perfected her pitch over a breakfast of waffles. She was ready.
This month, Martin’s idea-a timely twist on the body-swap genre-comes to fruition, making her the youngest-ever executive producer on a big-budget movie. Little follows Jordan Sanders (Regina Hall), a hotheaded tech mogul known as much for her ruthless leadership style as for her killer wardrobe. But when she happens to cross a 13-year-old girl armed with literal Black Girl Magic, Sanders is transformed into an actual Girlboss. Martin plays the mini version of Sanders, who navigates this new reality-in a covetable pink pantsuit that the young actress “would totally wear”-with the help of her assistant April (Issa Rae). “Marsai is a perfect example of a young girl having creative ideas and anything-is-possible energy,” says director Tina Gordon, who cowrote 2002’s Drumline.
Born Caila Marsai Martin, just outside Dallas, the burgeoning star has been performing since she learned to talk. At age two, Martin babbled along to Beyoncé’s “Déjà Vu.” At four, she covered “Halo,” and by six, she was riffing to “Love on Top.” Beyoncé was, and still is, her favorite singer. (They finally met at the 2016 White House Easter Egg Roll: “She smells like everything that smells good,” she remembers.) When Martin was nine years old, her family moved from suburban Texas to Southern California. Within four months, their daughter had landed over a dozen national commercials and a role on a new ABC pilot, about an upper-middle-class black family in Los Angeles. Over 100 people auditioned for the role of Black-ish’s Diane, but after Martin read lines with Miles Brown (already locked in as Diane’s twin brother), the producing team sent everyone else home. They’d found their twins. “Immediately they felt like brother and sister,” Barris says. When Martin approached him with the idea of reimagining the 1988 film Big for the current moment, “I was like, Stop! You got me,” he says. “We talked about how black women have a hard time seeing themselves as children because they have to be adults so much of the time. We wanted the movie to show what you don’t see about being a young black girl.”
As the end of Black-ish’s fifth season draws near, Martin is already looking ahead. She wants to do a live-action Marvel film and is diving into her own online beauty tutorials. Still, she obsesses over things typical for her age: Tyler, the Creator; her two-year-old sister; Gucci fanny packs; and the online comedy duo the Dolan Twins. (“I have a crush on them, but I’m not gonna say which one,” she jokes.) As Little proves, she’s a killer example of Generation Z’s outcome-oriented optimism. Barris sums it up: “We are all going to be working for her one day.”
This article originally appeared in the April 2019 issue of ELLE.
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