From Child Star to CEO, Marsai Martin Is Just Getting Started

When Black-ish’s final episode aired on ABC in April 2022, Marsai Martin, who had grown up on the ABC sitcom as the sharp-tongued Diane Johnson, found herself at a pivotal juncture. Exiting both high school and the comedy series that gave her her big break at age nine, Martin was contemplating her next steps—but with the added complexity of figuring it all out in Hollywood's spotlight.

“I was 17, so it was already that time for me anyways,” she recalls. “I watched different people growing up like Yara [Shahidi] and my other friends who decided to go different routes with college. I was just trying to figure out what was for me.”

So, she threw a party.

The first annual rendition of Sai Summer Cookout was thrown in Atlanta on Labor Day Weekend 2023, as Martin hosted an outdoor festival to inspire and connect students from historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs). Though she didn’t go the college route, the actress is passionate about HBCU culture, and jumped at the opportunity to support the students of these systematically underfunded schools.

“Who is someone that age who is actually pouring into them?” she asked herself. In another life, Martin might have attended an HBCU in her home state. Instead, the now-yearly event has become Martin’s “version of seeing what that alternative lifestyle would've looked like for me, being around young adults my age, who are just aspiring to grow, and be in different spaces that in some cases I've already been in. That is something that I was really excited to create, for sure.”

The 20-year-old has an abundance of experience to share. In the same year she completed her first season of Black-ish, she pitched the idea that would become the 2019 comedy Little, impressing seasoned executives like Kenya Barris and Will Packer. She was eventually number one on the call sheet and became the youngest-ever executive producer on a Hollywood feature film. Along with her parents, she founded her own company, Genius Entertainment—before she reached legal driving age.

As I chat with her over Zoom one weekday morning, we easily sink into a relaxed rhythm, thanks in part to her outfit: a casual tank top, glasses, and an orange silk scarf tied into a headband. It feels like I’m talking to a little cousin who’s working through what adulthood means—sorting through new routines, recalibrating relationships, and imagining what life looks like beyond the set.

“Ultimately we're all just trying to look for the same thing, which is...What is our gift? What does our journey look like? Who are the people we need to connect with to get there?”

Caila Marsai Martin was born in Plano, Texas, soon after the majority of her family made the big move from California to the Dallas metro area. “Aside from politics, it's still, I believe, one of the best places to live in the U.S.,” she says of the city where she still travels every holiday season.

The future star grew up in nearby Little Elm as an only child, living with her parents, grandma, and great-grandma in a house that serves as the familial nexus, with uncles and cousins staying over throughout the years. “I was always the youngest around,” Martin tells me. “And my parents were both working 24/7, so it was only me and my great-grandma for most of the time.”

Martin was only nine years old when she and her parents, Carol and Joshua Martin, moved from the Dallas metropolitan area to Los Angeles. Shortly after, she landed her breakout role on Black-ish. She says she felt more nervous around costars closer to her own age—like Shahidi and Marcus Scribner—than the other iconic actors on set, from Laurence Fishburne to Tracee Ellis Ross. “I was just so used to being around my aunts and old people.”

The “do I fit in” jitters extended to her social life at school, too. Martin recalled other kids treating her “very weirdly” as she skipped several days a week to work on the Disney lot. It also didn’t help that the “surfer kids” in Southern California were so different, and so much whiter, than her school in Little Elm—where she had made friends that she’s still in touch with to this day.

She recalls making the decision to start homeschooling, and telling her parents: “I said, 'I can't do it anymore. These kids, I'm over it.”

After the show picked up and she entered homeschooling, Martin was set up on “blind friendships,” where her parents set her up with acquaintances' kids to break up the routine of going from the soundstage back home to sit on the computer. “It was definitely forced. It was for sure, like, ‘Girl, you need to make friends.'”

As she approaches her 21st birthday, the self-described “late bloomer” is starting to explore new kinds of relationships, including deeper friendships and emotional independence. “I think when you go through your 20s, what you do for your job is probably the smallest part within so many things, where you’re just trying to understand yourself and learning independence.”

Martin is embracing the generational instinct to separate work from identity, but that doesn’t mean she’s retreating from public life.

Earlier this year, she made her action film debut in G20, playing the tech-savvy daughter of Viola Davis’s U.S. President. While Black-ish’s Diane Johnson might have called out her parents’ hypocrisy, G20’s Serena Sutton hacks White House security to sneak out to a bar—and ends up helping her mom foil crypto-terrorists at a global summit. The film ends with Martin, Davis, and The Boys’ Antony Starr in a showdown involving a helicopter and hand-to-hand combat.

“I didn’t shoot a gun or anything. I didn't do my one-two,” Martin jokes, miming punches. But it was her first up-close look at Davis, who produced the film as well as starred in it. What stood out most to Martin was the tight-knit team Davis had built around herself—her longtime trainer, glam squad, crew—and how it let her lead with calm and confidence. “Community is everything,” Martin says. “Seeing her lead with such grace, I was like, ‘That’s how you do it.’”

But Martin’s earliest lessons in leadership and collaboration didn’t come from Hollywood—they came from home. Her parents, who have helped guide her career from the start, modeled a spirit of trust and curiosity that still fuels her creative ambitions. Nearly a decade ago, not long after the family moved to the Granada Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles, she was watching Tom Hanks’ 1988 comedy Big with her mother and father when she had an idea: what if the premise were updated for a new generation? That conversation became Little.

“We would go band for band like, ‘And then she does this,’ and Mom was like, ‘Well, what if she’s wearing that?’” she recalls. Years later, she found herself wearing the exact outfit they’d imagined—loose afro and all—as one of the leads and producer on set.

Time melted for Martin in that moment; the living-room conversation seemed like just the day prior as the years of pre-development faded away. She now describes that euphoric feeling as an “addiction” she immediately began chasing. “As soon as I was done filming Little, I was like, 'Now how are we gonna do that again?' And that's why we created Genius.”

The young CEO has followed a similar ethos while choosing projects under her banner Genius Productions, which she founded at age 12. She’s most passionate about ideas that are “outlandish” by Hollywood standards, with a strong point of view directed toward a specific audience rather than something tailored for mainstream (read: white) consumption. So far, that has meant projects speaking to Black kids, from the coming of age comedy Saturdays, centered on a Black teen and her friends frequenting a Chicago skate rink, to the forthcoming LA Fridge, about a Black queer teen who reunites with her estranged father.

“It might not connect to everyone, but it connects to someone out there,” she says. “Someone will be like, ‘Exactly, that’s what I’ve been looking for,’” she adds.

With all her years on set, Martin has seen a range of leadership styles—and not all of them good. “I don't know, a lot of people are mean. A lot of people do a lot of crazy things when it comes to power,” she says. She admires how Rihanna and Issa Rae have built empires on authenticity and trust, but she’s also learned to watch for the quieter cues, like how assistants are treated on a call.

“I think power is a thing that you have to use with grace,” she says. “I know the type of boss that I would want to be—to be able to use power in ways where it's graceful and impactful and it feels real. But it is hard for me to see that from anybody else, because I'm kind of creating what that looks like in my mind from the experiences that I've had connected to it.”

Months before her 21st birthday, Martin has more unanswered questions about her personal life than the long-lead projects she’s working on, which includes a dramatic feature where she stars as a daughter reconnecting with her estranged father, played by Rob Morgan. “I'm now just learning about what relationships look like, being able to connect with people my age, and being able to communicate and navigate my emotions,” she says.

Though she’s already a mogul, Martin knows she’s just getting started. “I was just having this conversation with my mom,” she says. “People see me in this light, yet I feel like I have so many more steps to go to get to the point of where I want to be. I’m just now at the age where I really understand the spaces I’m in, what it takes to get there, and the different walls I have to break down to let my voice and presence be seen and heard.”

Photographer: OK McCausland | Hair Stylist: Cheryl Bergamy-Rosa | Makeup Artist: Kauv Onazh | Location: Park Lane New York