PHOTOGRAPHED BY MATT SAYLES
You may best know him as Andre Johnson Jr., the television son of Anthony Anderson and Tracee Ellis Ross on Black-ish, where he joined the cast in 2013, but Marcus Scribner is spreading his wings. This summer, he will join the cast of series spinoff Grown-ish for its fifth season as the younger brother of Yara Shahidi’s Zoey. He’s also in the Netflix film Along for the Ride and has an animated show on Hulu called Dragons: The Nine Realms.
The native Angeleno admits that, at first, acting felt like a hobby to him. “I honestly never thought that it would turn into anything more than that,” he says. “I was like 7 years old [when I started acting] and having a good time with it, but being an actor now is like a dream come true.”
When Scribner first landed his role as Junior on Black-ish, it was his first series-regular role, for which he later won an NAACP Image Award. “Some of the most important advice I got from everybody was diversifying to continue pushing forward and creating new things and to keep people guessing. So I think that’s what it’s all about—forward momentum and consistency,” he says. “I honestly didn’t see myself joining Grown-ish, but I’m excited to be joining the show, taking it in a new direction and kind of adding some different spunk,” he says of reprising the role of Junior, but in a “different way than we’ve ever seen him before.”
This momentum also pushed Scribner to launch his own production company, Scribner Productions. “My goal is to uplift and bring young Black voices to mainstream media and make us into superheroes and secret agents and all those sorts of things,” he says. His company is currently adapting a fantasy novel with a full script and production team behind it. “I’m trying to bring Black people into a fantasy world because I grew up loving stories like Eragon and Lord of the Rings, but never really saw myself represented in them… so it’s an exciting time where we can take back that power and really do something cool and represent our culture.”
As for his dream role? “Definitely a superhero film,” he says of the fantasy epic he hopes to play in and produce. Scrinber may be all grown up, but he’s just getting started.
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