If you’re hooked on Freeform’s Good Trouble like most of us, you’ve heard of Zuri Adele. The groundbreaking actress portrays Malika Williams, a Black Lives Matter activist, and takes on the hard-hitting topics in The Fosters spinoff. The woman behind Malika is equally inspiring, as you’ll see in our Zuri Adele wiki.
| About Zuri Adele | |
|---|---|
| Known As | Zuri Ray-Alladice |
| Age | 34 Years |
| Birth | April 10, 1990 |
| Gender | Female |
| Height | 5 feet 7 inches |
| Parents | Darryl Alladice, Elaine Ray |
| Nationality | American |
| Job | Actress |
| Alumni | UCLA, British American Drama Academy, Spelman College, Gunn High School |
| Shows | Good Trouble |
| Hometowns | Boston, Massachusetts and Palo Alto, California |
Zuri Adele Is from Boston and Lived in California
Zuri Adele Ray-Alladice was reportedly born on April 10, 1990 and is a native of Boston, Massachusetts. She grew up in California where she attended Gunn High School in Palo Alto.
An exceptional student, Zuri was one of three winners of the Gunn High School 2008 Faculty Cup when she graduated that year. MC Hammer even handed out the diplomas at her graduation!
She later attended Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia, where she acquired her BA in drama. She also spent a year studying drama in London at the British American Drama Academy. She would return to California to pursue her MFA in acting from UCLA.
Adele’s Father Is Poet Darryl Alladice
Zuri Adele is the daughter of Darryl Alladice and Elaine Ray, two very notable literary personalities. Darryl Alladice is a renowned poet/storyteller and writer.
He has performed all over the world and calls Brooklyn his home. According to Adele, Alladice is a very active persona who, besides performing, also bikes all over Brooklyn and teaches youth.
However, Alladice’s outgoing lifestyle has slowed down on account of his sickle cell anemia, a severe disease of the blood cells. In a heartbreaking December 2018 post, Adele revealed that her father was admitted to a hospital due to complications from the disease days before on Christmas Eve. She was on a flight to Brooklyn to visit him at the time.
She called for more awareness about the disease and free access to healthcare in the post. She also described how the family came together to support her father during the difficult time.
But this is not the end for Alladice. The performance poet is still doing what he loves and has an upcoming show on May 5, 2019.
Adele’s Mother Worked at The Boston Globe
Adele’s mother, Elaine Ray, is an award-winning journalist and writer. During her illustrious career, Ray was a writer and editor for Essence and The Boston Globe. She also was a communications leader at Stanford University.
After winning awards for her journalistic work and short stories, Ray went on to pursue her MFA in creative writing at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
Ray also blogs about her family, which gives us a lot of insight into Zuri. According to one of Ray’s posts, Adele has had a knack for performing since she was child.
Good Trouble Is Zuri’s First Major Role
According to Elaine Ray, their family is filled with artists of various talents and Adele has shown acting chops since she was at least three years old. Besides being trained in the art of drama, Zuri Adele has worked as an acting instructor at the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls in South Africa as well as UCLA.
She started out in theater, bagging the lead role several times during her time at BADA, Spelman, and UCLA. She would go on to work professionally in regional theater as well as appear in commercials for Krogers and AT&T.
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Adele ventured into acting in front of a camera and won critical acclaim for her work in short films like The Social Worker (2014). But her start in TV was slow.
She worked on a couple of TV pilots, was the lead in the TV movie Plenty, and had a guest role in the CBS series Under the Dome. Adele’s resume reveals she hasn’t had many jobs over the years, however.
In several Instagram posts, she speaks about going through a difficult few years. She mentioned in one post that she took a gamble traveling from Georgia to California to pursue her MFA.
During the road trip to UCLA with her boyfriend, the pair broke up in Phoenix, Arizona. That, with the pressure of her studies, overwhelmed her with several emotions. One of her closest friends, Tammy Warren, helped her through the difficult period.
Adele overcame her low point, and in 2018, she was cast in The Fosters spinoff, Good Trouble, which premiered in January 2019. It’s her first role as a series regular on a sold show and her winning portrayal of Black Lives Matter activist Malika is an inspiring representation of women of color on TV.
The show is tackling tough topics—from LGBTQ issues to discussing racial profiling. Through Malika, the show has explored the debate on privilege, representation of minorities in media, and racial bias in dating.
And Malika is not that different from the woman who portrays her. In fact, Adele also raises several issues on her social profiles.
“Malika and I would be best friends,” Zuri gushed about her character. “She is bold and self-expressive. She speaks up for herself and is independent. I’m very independent, too. We have that in common. She really lit a fire under me to speak up for myself and trust that my life is absolutely as it’s supposed to be.”
She Identifies with the LGBTQ+ Community
Good Trouble, like its parent show, has been remarkable in increasing LGBTQ visibility. The show is getting a lot of attention for Tommy Martinez’s bisexual character, Gael.
Malika does not identify with the LGBTQ community but embraces the diverse personalities of her fellow residents of The Coterie, the communal living space Foster sisters Callie and Mariana moved to.
Unlike Malika, though, Zuri Adele is a proud bisexual, even captioning #fluidAF in a recent empowering Instagram post. She revealed that Good Trouble inspired her to be her true self while portraying Malika.
“This is a great time [in TV], especially with Good Trouble. … We’re putting a bisexual character [Gael] on television who is multidimensional, and I think it’s a great time for a bisexual actor like myself to also represent for the community,” Adele said. “The show is holding [the characters], like the actors, also accountable to live authentically as who we are in our real life.”
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