'Raven's Home' actors meet LI kids

We met Raven-Symoné (who stars as Raven Baxter), Issac Ryan Brown (Booker Baxter-Carter) and Navia Robinson (Nia Baxter-Carter) at the ABC offices in Manhattan recently. The topic was their third season with “Raven’s Home,” on Disney Channel.

Raven, do you have a favorite brand of makeup?

Raven: Yes. My favorite makeup is Becca. And I like to look as natural as possible, because I feel nowadays the trend is to look as made up as possible. So I have to go on camera today [she was wearing makeup for the camera] . . . but mostly I like to keep it really natural.

Do any of you do anything special before you go on set?

Raven: I just stay in my bathroom. No, I’m just playing.  

Navia: I do sleep on the couch on set.

Issac: Some days I’ll come to work with our onesies, because we have Onesie Wednesdays. That’s something that happens on a regular basis.

What is the funniest thing that happened on the set?

Raven: Oh, my goodness. You know we’ve been working for two years, almost three years from Season 1 to Season 2, so the funniest thing that happened on the set, it piles up. One of my memories from Season 1 is when I had to do a scene with “the bra” about the training bra, and it was with Anneliese [van der Pol, who plays Chelsea Grayson] and Raven. And at this point I had barely worked with them [other cast members]. Like this is one of the first episodes and so I wasn’t used to their kind. I didn’t know they were going to start throwing bras around and putting them on their heads. They actually did.

Would you be something else if not an actor?

Raven: Yes, I’d be a lawyer.

Issac: I would be a writer. I love writing. Usually when I do school, I can’t really stay focused a lot, as Navia knows. Last night I stayed up like till 12 o’clock, and I wrote like three paragraphs straight, and I put on new music. . . . And I was just fantastic. I like writing.

What is one of your favorite memories from being on the set?

Issac: Probably staying late with everybody. Back in Season 1 we used to have parties at the end of every episode. The writers and everybody, they would talk about what we faced and everything, but in Season 2, we didn’t really do that. But we still stayed, and we watched Netflix.

Navia: Yeah, we watched horror movies.

Issac: “Chuckie.” It was really weird at one point. "The Shining." Oh, gosh.

Navia: “The Shining” was so weird.

How did you all feel when you made the remix of Priscilla?

Raven: When Disney said that they wanted to do a special event for "Raven’s Home," they brought up the fact of the musical because “That’s So Raven” had done a musical. . . . So when they said, "Do you think the cast can handle a musical?" I said, "We’ve been waiting for you to help us come out of our closet for a really long time." We worked with Paul Hoen, who directed “Zombies” and “The Cheetah Girls 3.” 

Issac: What I really like about the musical is that even though our music is completely different, so are our settings. We all have different settings, and each song has their own meaning.  

Navia: Not a lot of people knew I sang. And I think the same thing for Issac. Like it wasn’t common knowledge. . . . They did channel uploading a couple of days ago of the musical, and the parents were telling me, We didn’t even know that you sang. So it’s really cool.

Raven, what’s the difference between playing Raven in "Raven’s Home" and “That’s So Raven?”

Raven: The biggest and most obvious is my age. At 15 I had no worries. I had no responsibilities except to get dressed the cutest possible and make sure that those mean girls weren’t messing with me. Raven Baxter has a family to take care of. She has to make sure that she’s bringing in money to provide food and shelter for her kids while she also put her dream on the back end.    

Did you leap out of your shoes when you heard that you were working with Raven?

Issac: When I found out I got the job, I was in South Central L.A., and I was doing a basketball practice because at the time that existed. But I was on a playground outside. It was a sand playground, and I took off my shoes. I was playing, all of a sudden — "Issac, come here." I didn’t put on my shoes. Why would I do that? I ran to the car and all of a sudden, "Issac, you’ve got the job." I was like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah!" I was shoeless.

Navia: I was really excited. I remember my brothers were even more excited than I was, weirdly, because they watched “That’s So Raven.” I never thought it was something that could happen, that could exist, and yeah, I was elated.

Tara Dungate and Veronica Weeks' fifth-grade class, Bretton Woods Elementary School, Hauppauge