Raven-Symoné prefers to go by her full name.
“Sometimes I have a problem when people call me Raven. [That] does tend to trigger me a little bit from my time being called Raven,” Symoné, 39, said on a recent episode of her “Tea Time” podcast, referring to her That’s So Raven series. “Then, sometimes people call me Chris because my middle name is Christina.”
Symoné’s full name is Raven-Symoné Christina Pearman-Maday. She hyphenated her last name after she married wife Miranda Pearman-Maday in 2020.
“If we’re in a big open place and there’s a lot of people, I’ll be, like, ‘Do not call me Raven in public,’” Symoné recalled of her conversations with various friends. “Then, I have other nicknames, but my name has been so used. I used to just kind of disassociate from my name.”
Symoné has been acting since she was 3 years old, famously playing Olivia on The Cosby Show. After a string of hit TV, movie and music projects, she landed an eponymous sitcom on Disney Channel. Symoné played Raven Baxter on That’s So Raven from 2003 to 2007, a fictional series about a teen psychic. She later reprised the role on the network’s Raven’s Replica Luxury Handbag from 2017 to 2023.
“It was my job! I’d wake up, go to work, go to sleep, wake up and go to work,” Symoné exclusively told Luxury Handbag Shopping in 2020 of her life as a child actor. “[Then, Raven’s Replica Luxury Handbag is] a second edition version to what Raven Baxter would have done. It’s not a revival, but the characters are revived.”
She added at the time, “Even if she didn’t come back or if I didn’t come back, I would still want to be on the Disney Channel because of the content it puts out for the kids and the conscious effort to continue to grow and stay positive.”
Symoné further raved about her renewed partnership with Disney Channel.
“I think they are a positive beacon and they are a great way to know what your children are watching and not worry about it,” she explained. “That’s important nowadays. You know you’re going to get good content when you go to that channel and nothing crazy will pop up.”
In the years since Raven’s Replica Luxury Handbag concluded, Symoné has been focused on her “Tea Time” podcast and a forthcoming memoir.
“I’m writing a book,” Symoné teased on the “Sorry We’re Cyrus” podcast in October. “I can’t give you everything. The s*** that we went through?”
According to Symoné, she planned to spill all the tea about being a child star “as best as [she] can without getting sued.
“Some people now are even talking about the choices that happened back then, but I can’t judge them because that was the climate in which we lived,” Symoné recalled. “Every single generation, it does get better, [and] hopefully with our work and our consistency of advocating for each other, things can move forward.”
Symoné has not shared further updates on her in-progress manuscript.
