California born and bred actress Corinne Massiah only needed her sister and an iPhone to secure her latest role as the teen daughter of Angela Bassett’s (“Black Panther,” “Waiting To Exhale”) character Athena Grant, on Fox’ new drama “9-1-1.” ”I auditioned in my bedroom,” she tells the AFRO. “It was a self-tape audition and my sister helped me with it. We had an iPhone camera on a little tripod. She helped me read the lines and it took about fifteen minutes. It was really easy.” Corinne summarily won the role of May Grant, a teenager caught, with her little brother, between her two beleaguered parents who aren’t doing a great job at coping with their pain.

Corinne Massiah is one of the stars of the new Fox drama ‘9-1-1.’ (Courtesy photo)

Co-starring Rockmond Dunbar (“Sons of Anarchy,” “Soul Food”), Aisha Hinds (“True Blood,” “Underground”), and Oliver Stark (“Into The Badlands”), “9-1-1” centers around the lives of a group of firefighters and first responders in Los Angeles. Debuting just a few weeks ago and already picked up for a second season, the series starts out with the Grant family in crisis. They are dealing with the shocking (or maybe not so much if we’re being honest) revelation that May’s dad is gay. In any case, Mama Grant is decidedly not taking the news well.

May has a lot of empathy for her father who has been struggling with this secret all his life. Massiah says, “Finding out her Dad is gay, she doesn’t really care. She loves her father and doesn’t care that he’s gay.” May though, is conflicted. She has an intuitive understanding of the concept of keeping up appearances even at such a young age. “May is just starting high school and she’s trying to find herself and at that age having friends is so important. She just wants him to be in the house so that it won’t affect her social relationships. That’s where she’s having such a big problem with it.”

Viewers might recognize Massiah from her four season run playing Rochelle Aytes’ (“Madea’s Family Reunion”) characters’ daughter Lucy on ABC’s “Mistresses.” Though she has been part of the often glamorous world of acting since she was a very young girl, it has brought its own challenges at times. Being a working person while still in elementary school required her to be at a level of maturity far ahead of her peers.

She explains, “Being in this business you have to develop a backbone earlier because you’re dealing with so much rejection at a young age. You’re also on set with adults so you have to be professional and mature. Some of the kids when I was nine and ten they didn’t understand that I wasn’t really into things that they were into, or I handled situations differently than them.”

Massiah never went to middle school. Because of her non-traditional schedule, which required being able to go out on auditions or filming at random, she was homeschooled from sixth through eighth grades. “The hardest thing was the social aspect because I’m very social and I love having friends. I didn’t have many friends when I was homeschooled so that was the hardest part.” She got through it all with the help of her family. “My Mom and my sister. I have a twin sister so I never go into anything really alone. It’s always us two. She’s always right by my side. My Mom, my sister, my Dad; they’re always around me.”

Now that she is in high school, she gets to foster her friendships doing some of her favorite things with them such as going to the movies in the newly renovated theater in her neighborhood. Massiah is also an avid volleyball player and has been involved in the sport since she was six years old. “I am very big into volleyball.” She emphasizes. “I was on my high school team and then I’m also on a club team.”

Massiah, who counts Zendaya, Jennifer Lawrence, and Angela Bassett as among her favorite actresses, has her own ideas about her character’s relationship with her family. She says, “I would want May to be closer to her Mom because there is a lot of tension between them. She can see how her parents are fighting so much and she totally accepts that her dad is gay but I don’t think she believes her Mom accepts him. I just want them to resolve it, to sit down and hopefully build a better relationship.”