Who played Zisa in Power Book III: Raising Kanan? The actress released a real album while playing a fictional singer

Zisa was Lou-Lou Thomas's season 2 hope: a singer good enough to justify his studio and, briefly, his heart. She was played by Paulina Singer, an actress whose surname was doing a lot of foreshadowing.

With Raising Kanan now wrapped after five seasons, Zisa reads as a small chapter. But she was the one season where Lou-Lou's music wasn't a running joke, and the woman playing her was making real records at the same time.

Who Zisa was

• Introduced in season 2 through her uncle Cartier Fareed (Omar Dorsey), who had a business mind and a drug business.
• Lou-Lou signs her, loses his girlfriend Jessica to a producer and to Los Angeles, and Zisa steps into both roles.
• She watches Lou-Lou kill Crown and asks, calmly, what they're doing with the body. Down from day one.
• Season 2 finale: Sal's Mafia gunmen storm the studio mid-session. Lou-Lou kills both hitters. Zisa is already gone.

Ten episodes, one relationship, an EP's worth of songs and a body-count exit. That is a Power universe love story with a happy ending, relatively speaking.

The real music

Singer, who also records as Zuzusilk, performed three original songs plus a remix of Hailey Kilgore's "Bruised" on the official season 2 soundtrack EP, which meant Zisa's studio sessions weren't lip-synced placeholders. That same fall she put out her own album, Freaq Wisdom, while the season aired, essentially running the character's arc and her own career in parallel.

She had a thesis about Zisa, too. "It's important for her to realize she's already a star," she told Variety, adding that she wanted women in a male-run industry to see someone taking charge of her own sound.

Where else you've seen her

NOS4A2, Tell Me a Story, Falling Water, a 2024 turn on Elsbeth, and a voice role on Everybody Still Hates Chris. Zisa got the shortest arc and, weirdly, the most complete one: she cut the record before the credits.