‘Raven’ spinoff lures actress back to roots at Disney
LOS ANGELES — Raven-Symone is focused, unsmiling as she stands behind the door of a high-school gymnasium.
She breaks her gaze only to mouth lines of dialogue or burst into song, rehearsing snippets from the musical episode she’s filming as the crew chatters on the other side of the door.
Symone, a TV veteran at 32, hardly needs the practice, but she’s game — bringing the same energy take after take, each time injecting her familiar vivacious attitude into her movements.
This is the set of “Raven’s Home,” now in its second season as a spinoff of “That’s So Raven,” the landmark Disney Channel series that skyrocketed her to fame in 2003.
She is still playing Raven Baxter, but the psychic teen in “That’s So Raven,” whose misleading visions caused hilarious trouble, is now a divorced mother of twins, one of whom has inherited her psychic abilities.
The twins — played by Navia Ziraili Robinson and Issac Ryan Brown — might be the lead characters, but the spinoff still relies on Symone’s physical comedy and dramatic exclamations, including her signature “Oh, snap!”
Symone grew up on the 1990s sitcoms “The Cosby Show” and “Hangin’ With Mr. Cooper,” but her career has been sandwiched by Disney, the network that allowed her to make history as the first African-American woman with her own name in the title of a TV comedy series since 1939’s “The Ethel Waters Show.”
In the post-“That’s So Raven” era, Symone starred in ABC Family’s short-lived “The State of Georgia” and showcased her powerful voice on Broadway • The Disney Channel will continue to show the first four episodes of season two of "Raven's Home" at 9:30 a.m. Tuesday through Thursday. The series then moves to its regular time slot of 9:30 a.m. Tuesdays and Fridays.
in “Sister Act” (2012) before becoming a controversial co-host of the ABC daytime talk show “The View."
Now, she has returned to her comfort zone: a kids’ show on the Disney Channel.
“There is a place in your life where you can be uncomfortably comfortable,” she said in a conference room of the “Raven’s Home,” set in Hollywood.
She is comfortable because she is playing the same character in a familiar high-school setting and is reunited with some of the network executives and staff members who have watched her grow since she was 15.
Yet she is uncomfortable because the actress also has an active behind-the-scenes role as a series executive producer.
“When you learn to get on a tightrope, you’re not just going to jump up on the tallest building,” Symone said. “You’re going to start a little bit low to the ground, so you have a net to catch you. I’m continuously having to make choices (as executive producer) that I didn’t have to make before, in a place where I know that if I fall, there’s someone to catch me.”
On the set, Symone takes her role as a mentor to her young co-stars seriously.
Brown was intimidated, he says, to face the pressure of being as good as Symone was when she was 14.
“I don’t think there’s anyone else I’d rather study under,” he said. “She’s the perfect example because she was a kid star. She really understands us.”