Shahadi Wright Joseph Opens Up About a Possible "Us" Sequel, Impressing Her Parents, and Perfecting an Evil Doppelganger

Like most teens, Shahadi Wright Joseph has a couple of fun ideas on how she wants to spend her upcoming birthday — they largely involve jumping on trampolines at Sky Zone and later chowing down on some rice at Benihana. But unlike many other 13-year-olds, the young performer has been busy working on some of the year’s most buzzed-about movies.

Shahadi dazzles as Zora Wilson in Jordan Peele’s horror film Us, the terrifying story of a family that comes face-to-face with their evil doppelgangers while on vacation. Playing Lupita Nyong’o’s and Winston Duke’s daughter in the thriller, Shahadi goes from a teen glued to her cell phone to a courageous fighter, helping to save her family from the nefarious forces at hand.

“I love seeing the movie when I'm with a full audience, hearing them scream and laugh,” Shahadi tells Teen Vogue. “It's like a whole experience.”

And if you sat in a packed theater while watching Us, bets are that audiences cheered on Shahadi during one of her defining moments in the film. About halfway through when her mother is taken by the sinister doppelganger versions of their family friends, Zora and her little brother Jason (Evan Alex) heroically face the villains to free their mom. She grabs a golf club for protection, eventually using it to fend off a pair of doppelganger twins. Zora makes it clear that she and her family are not to be messed with.

“That was definitely the moment that struck people the most with my character,” Shahadi says.

Along with playing Zora, Shahadi had the chance to show just how creepy she can be as her malevolent-smiling, scissor-snipping doppelganger Umbrae. The wicked character’s grin is enough to strike terror in anyone’s heart. She worked with Jordan to nail the intense half laugh, half smile. Although Shahadi is downright chilling as Umbrae, it turns out it didn’t freak out her parents all that much.

“I don't think so, just because they were the ones that actually helped me prepare for the role,” she says. “They really weren't that creeped out by it, but I think that they were kind of impressed in my golf club wielding skills.”

This might have all been new territory for the performer since it was her first horror film, but Shahadi has plenty of acting experience. Born and raised in New York, she played Madison in the original Broadway production of School of Rock and took on the role of Little Inez in 2016’s Hairspray Live! alongside industry pros such as Jennifer Hudson and Ariana Grande. She does admit that with her character in Us she had to “switch this role up a lot.”

“We really had to dig deep into our emotions to find these characters, and it was such a great experience, me learning how to act a different way than I've been doing it before,” she says. “[Both theatre and movies] are really fun, but I think that I definitely like film a little bit better, just because you get a little bit more freedom with learning your role.”

It’s all been a wild ride for Shahadi, who says her best memory has been the amazing relationships she’s built with her on-screen family and Jordan. In fact, even before she played Lupita’s daughter there was a coincidental connection: for a project in grade school, Shahadi memorized and presented Lupita’s Best Supporting Actress Oscar speech from 2014.

As for where Zora would be in a potential sequel? Shahadi has some ideas.

“I think that she would definitely be much stronger, much more of a warrior because she's endured all of this with her family and fighting her own doppelganger,” she says. “She has a closer relationship to her brother, Jason, because they've gone through this together, and I think that it actually made them stronger as brother and sister in the end.”

She also recognizes the power of seeing a black family come together in a huge movie like Us and the representation it provides.

“It's really good representation [of the] black community,” she says. “They're a happy, healthy family. A lot of families look exactly like them. So it's such a relatable family, that I think that it comes close to home for a lot of people.”

Later this year, she’ll voice young Nala in Disney’s Lion King remake. Shahadi has yet to see any of the animation for the film beyond the trailer, so she’s pining to finally get a glimpse at how it all looks. And no, she still hasn’t met Beyoncé, even though the music legend is lending her voice for the older version of Nala. That means she probably has a few more months to prep what she’ll say to Queen Bey.

And if you’re also seeing double on Shahadi’s Instagram, that’s not your eyes playing a trick on you. In some of her recent posts, it looks like she has her own IRL doppelganger, the two Shahadis posing next to each other. Her makeup artist Tim showed her an app that would clone her image that she thought was cool, so she started having her mom take pictures with it. Rest assured, Shahadi does not have an evil twin in real life.

Related: The Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark Trailer Is Basically All My Childhood Nightmares

Let us slide into your DMs. Sign up for the Teen Vogue daily email.