Why Alisha Wainwright May Seem Familiar to Netflix Users

Alisha Wainwright is making headlines after some curious shots of her and Justin Timberlake surfaced on Saturday, but Netflix users know her for another reason. The 30-year-old actress first made a mark on television sets as Maia Roberts on Freeform’s Shadowhunters, but now she is the face of one of Netflix’s new properties, Raising Dion. Raising Dion is a 9-episode sc-fi series on the streaming service that follows a young boy who begins to show signs of having superpowers. His mother then has to grapple with what this means for her son and their lives.

Wainwright plays the aforementioned mother in the story, Nicole Reese. Aside from serving as a mother to Dion (Ja’Siah Young) she also has to deal with the absence of her late husband, portrayed by Michael B. Jordan, and protect Dion from companies wanting to exploit Dio’s power. Wainwright appears as Nicole in all nine episodes of the show.

While the show has yet to be renewed for a second season, it seems to be a hit, with loads of online support for the series. That support has been something Wainwright has had to get used to, being as she went from a dedicated fan base following a show week-to-week, to a large streaming audience knowing every detail of the show without hours of its release.

“I come from a weekly format, where you all get together and you’d do a live tweet, so it’s this event where everyone sits down. Obviously, people are watching it in different time zones, but the network will set up it up for us to all be on east coast time and it’s this whole singular event. Whereas with Raising Dion, I woke up on Friday morning and people had already binged the show,” Wainwright told Collider in October. “I was so impressed by the dedication of the Netflix binge-ing community, but also people who had been eager for the show to come out and wanted to be able to get ahead of any spoilers, or anything like that. And there are quite a few opportunities to get spoiled, so anyone who wants to watch any TV, you have to stay away from social media.

“I thought it was interesting because, on a week to week format, usually you can like get something to trend on Twitter and have an instant dialogue. Whereas with Raising Dion, I will refresh the search on my Twitter, and every second, there’s a new comment about it. It’s this intense, consistent dialogue that’s happening over hours and over days, and I don’t even know how to process that level of social media interaction. It dies down in between the weeks ’cause you’re looking for that next episode, but with nine episodes to see everything, all at once, some people are talking about Episode 5, and some people are freaking out about Episode 9, or some people have just watched the first episode and want to rave about that. So, it’s crazy to see where people are at, in their binge-ing process.”

In that same interview, she also dished on one of the reasons she think its such a hit: the unique story being told.

“There’s two really unique things about the show,” she said. “It deals with a child that’s very young. He’s only seven years old. And then, it’s from the perspective of a single mother. You’re hitting two unique demographics. You’re hitting young moms, and then you’re also connecting with young children. You’ve got both of those perspectives, so it also makes it great for family viewing. Everyone can identify with feelings of motherhood, or what it was like for your mother when she was raising you, or your mother figure. And then, seeing the superpowers through a kid’s eyes makes you want to live in his wonder and imagination.”

All episodes of Raising Dion are currently streaming on Netflix.

Photo Credit: Steve Dietl/Netflix