Latto Makes Acting Debut as Smooth-Talking Wine Saleswoman on ‘Grown-ish’

Latto is building up her IMDB page. Earlier this week, the rapper made her acting debut in an episode of Freeform’s Grown-ish as the smooth-talking wine sales representative Sloane. During the episode, she stops by a winery to drop off a delivery for Doug (Diggy Simmons) and snags a date — as well as her commission. “You can’t rush fine wine…or fine women,” she tells him.

And she isn’t in a rush to totally transition from music to acting either, but Latto has enjoyed dipping her toe into the water. “I want to get in my acting bag, because I see myself going out like Rihanna. I don’t see myself doing music forever,” Latto recently told Cosmo. “Maybe it has to do with the fact that I’ve been doing it for so long already. Sometimes you just want more. I just did my first little acting gig the other day and I fell in love with that. I like more serious roles.”

Grown-ish has opened its set up to a number of musicians during its final season. Along with Latto, the series has featured appearances from Kelly Rowland, Omarion, and NLE Choppa.

Earlier this year, show creator Kenya Barris spoke to Rolling Stone about Grown-ish, which premiered in 2018 as a spin-off of Black-ish. Both series, and the prequel Mixed-ish have previously been criticized for perpetuating colorism, particularly as it relates to Black women. It’s not unlike the criticism Latto faced early in her career when she was still performing under the moniker Mulatto, a controversial term that refers to people of mixed white and Black ancestry.

“Grown-ish was a spinoff of the character that was the daughter on black-ish. So I think that people needed to have something to say,” Barris explained. “With that being said, I am so happy that I chose to use those characters that I knew really well and to talk about those things, because I felt like the show was far more successful than it wasn’t. And it talked about things that hadn’t necessarily been spoken about before.”

He added: “And I feel like I’ve heard the – some of my favorite jokes, you know: you say biracial in the mirror three times, Kenya Barris appears. Drake’s baby looks like Kenya Barris produced it. Like, I get it. I get the jokes. But I also feel like if you look at my body of work, everything I’ve done has been to try and promote Black culture in every form and to show that we’re not monolithic and there’s so many versions of us.”