Elliot C. Williams
Phoenix Averiyire began her acting career by dodging a scam.
She was just 7 years old and was pretending to sleep while eavesdropping on her mother’s conversation in a room nearby. Her mother, reading a web story aloud, mentioned something about an open call to be on Disney Channel.
“I woke up out of my sleep, and I was like, ‘I wanna be on Disney!'” Averiyire says. She practiced for the audition and aced it, later receiving a callback. But the opportunity wasn’t as advertised.
“They wanted you to pay $2,000 to be on Disney,” says Averiyire, who goes by Phierce Phoenix in her acting career. She and her mother backed out of the situation before things went too far.
Still, the experience was formative, and her initial excitement never waned. “That’s when I realized that I wanted to be an actress,” says Averiyire, who gained notoriety recently for her appearance on ABC’s Abbott Elementary. After that first audition, she continued trying out for shows and before long, booked her first theater job. For that role, she played the lead munchkin in The Wiz at Spotlighters Theatre in Baltimore, where she’s lived for most of her life.
Averiyire began taking acting more seriously around age 9. She worked with acting coaches in Prince George’s County, namely Talented Young Folks, a company based in Lanham, and McKinnon Acting Studio, an on-camera acting studio in Laurel.
Now age 13, she has so many auditions and acting gigs on both coasts that she can usually be found bouncing between New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago.
It’s possible your kid (or niece or nephew) has heard her voice. Averiyire plays The Mole on Peacock Kids’ Skully and the Mole Crack the Case, and she’s voiced animated roles on Nickelodeon shows including Bubble Guppies, Yoga Friends, and Paw Patrol, for which she won a Young Artist Academy award.
At age 10, she gained local attention for her touching rendition of “Amazing Grace” in Black Carpet Productions’ Nuthin’ But The Truth at the Bowie Center for the Performing Arts. She also played Tina Turner’s young sister in Tina: The Tina Turner Musical on Broadway and appeared as a young enslaved girl in the 2019 film Harriet.
But it’s likely you’re more familiar with her appearance on Abbott Elementary, Quinta Brunson’s heartwarming series about an underfunded Philadelphia public elementary school. The show has already collected an impressive list of Emmy, Critics’ Choice, and Golden Globe awards.
Averiyire, who plays a student named Malika, delivers a darkly comedic line in a season two episode titled “Fundraiser.” While trying to sell candy to raise money for a field trip, Malika purposely falls on a set of stairs to draw sympathy from Jacob, the only young white teacher at the school, who asks: “Malika, are you OK?”
“No, but I’d feel a lot better if you bought candy from me … an at-risk Black youth,” she says, grinning into the camera and stealing the show.
Averiyire originally auditioned to play one of the older girls who get in a fight in a different episode — after she didn’t get that part, her agent sent her the audition for Malika.
“I was super excited, because Abbott is such a big show, and to find out that I booked it, it was super amazing,” says Averiyire. “It’s actually really exciting to go on TikTok and see people saying, ‘Oh, bring Malika back, she was so funny.’ That literally makes my heart so happy.”
Her favorite part of the experience was riding a golf cart around Warner Bros. Studios in Hollywood, eating the on-set catering, and having her own dressing room with her character name on it. Oh, and meeting celebs like Brunson and Janelle James, of course, whom she calls “the nicest people on planet Earth.”
It can all be a little overwhelming, however.
“Sometimes, I get multiple auditions a week,”Averiyire says. “Just two days ago, I had to be on a flight, and I had three auditions the night before. So it’s really crazy, especially because I am a kid and I also have to do school. That can be a little challenging sometimes. But luckily, I’m homeschooled. So I get to kind of move my schedule around.”
Averiyire deals with the pressure by taking time to enjoy things in her life that feel normal, like eating Pizza Hut, going to the movies with her family, or playing on the soccer team she’s been on since she was 6 years old, she says.
Her advice to other aspiring young actors sounds like it could be coming from someone much older: “You have to make sure that it’s something you 100% want to do because it would suck to do all that work and then decide that it’s not fun for you. It has to be fun.”
Like all actors, she’s also seen her fair share of rejections — but notes that things can change in an instant. “When COVID first started, I was doing like eight auditions a week where I didn’t book anything. And then last year, I booked 16 jobs,” she says.
As for whether viewers can expect more hilarious lines from Averiyire on Abbott Elementary? Ever the impressive actress, she answers tactfully without giving away any spoilers:
“I will say that all episodes of Abbott are amazing,” she says. “I guess you’ll have to wait and see.”
