Maleah Joi Moon is entering her freshman season of television — and is trying to savor the moment.
”This is my first anything with film and TV,” the actress says. “I’m flying by the seat of my pants — much like my character in the show.”
Moon leads new Netflix series “A Different World,” a sequel to the late 1980s-early ’90s NBC sitcom about a group of students at a fictional historically black college. “The show is such a juggernaut piece in Black culture, especially in the Black film and TV landscape,” Moon says. “Being a part of this legacy has been such an affirming experience for me.”
In 2025, Moon made her Broadway debut and won the Tony award for best leading actress, in the Alicia Keys jukebox musical “Hell’s Kitchen.” After awards season, Debbie Allen, who led the creative charge for the original run of “A Different World,” came to see the musical and met Moon after the show. “I had no idea that I would be seeing her again very soon after that,” Moon adds.
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A year later, when Moon was getting ready to move on from the theater production, she received an email about auditioning for an untitled HBCU project. “ As soon as I opened it, I knew exactly what it was,” she says.
The Netflix series, executive produced by Allen, picks up the story with a new generation of students at Hillman College. Moon leads the show as Deborah Wayne, the daughter of original characters and Hillman alums Whitley Gilbert-Wayne and Dwayne Wayne, portrayed by Jasmine Guy and Kadeem Hardison, who are among the returning original cast members featured in the show.
“The legacy cast did such a beautiful job at enveloping us from the moment that they met us,” Moon says. “There is an inspired feeling of familiarity with them, and also a refreshing newness at the same time getting to know these people that I only really know from on-screen.”
Rebooting a beloved legacy series can come with high expectations from viewers, and higher stakes for the creative team. “I found a way, thankfully, to alchemize that fear into responsibility, and stepping into it with gratitude,” says Moon, whose first glimpse about how the show would be embraced arrived when the trailer was released last month. While the original series was a multicamera sitcom filmed with a live audience, the Netflix series reflects a more contemporary version of narrative serial storytelling, a distinction that Moon hopes will help viewers approach their version as its own chapter.
“I’ve seen things that are like, ‘Why are we touching this?’ and stuff like that, and I absolutely understand it, because when you care so much about something that has impacted you, it’s like, ‘Please don’t touch my baby. This means so much to me,’” Moon says. “And I want people to know that we understand the feeling of wanting this to go well and wanting it to be perfect.”
But despite that trepidation, there’s also been a wave of positivity. Mindful about how much she engages with social media, Moon decided to let herself receive the “good, the bad, the scary, the exciting” of viewer reactions in the first few days after the trailer was released.
“And I was so pleasantly — not even surprised, but just inundated with the way people were receiving the trailer,” she says. “I hope that people feel like we treated their baby with love and tenderness and respect as we usher our new iteration into the world,” she adds. “And continue the legacy of promoting hope, education and becoming for young people.”
Moon is in her own era of becoming, and expresses a mix of awe and gratitude for the projects that are defining the beginning of her acting career.
“Sometimes as a young actor, especially through social media, you see so many people going where you want to go in life that you kinda get into this way of processing that’s like, ‘Just keep moving forward. Keep next step, next step, next step.’ And then a moment like this requires you to look up and be like, ‘OK, look how far I’ve gotten,’” she says. “I get to build and find myself as an artist in this wonderful environment with people I look up to, actors from the legacy show who have given me so much guidance and knowledge and love and embrace throughout this entire process.”
The 23-year-old actress grew up in New Jersey, “enamored by all forms of art and acting and performing,” she says. “Which is how I ended up finding musical theater — my dad introduced me to music at a very young age and film and TV at a very young age.” She attended the theater program at Pace University before joining the development cast of “Hell’s Kitchen” for its Public Theatre run, and stayed with the production for two years as it moved onto Broadway and through Tony Awards season. Afterward, she was excited to spread her wings beyond the theater landscape, but adds that theater is “still very much” her first love.
Heading into fall, she’ll continue promoting “A Different World,” and has a few other potential projects that she can’t talk about yet. “ I wanna dip my toe back into theater, as I’ve taken a little break from it to work on this project,” Moons says. “I have had some conversations about going back there. So we shall see how it all turns out.”
