Aisha Dee: ‘I didn’t fit the mould of an Australian girl’
The Bold Type star Aisha Dee gets candid about her experiences with the film industry in Australia, and why it forced her to relocate to the US.
Stellar
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She may have made a name for herself in the hit US series The Bold Type, but Australian actor Aisha Dee has long been searching for great projects closer to home. Here, she talks to Stellar about Hollywood, defying stereotypes and finally returning to our shores.
There was a lot to catch up on when, in 2020, Aisha Dee returned home to work in Australia for the first time in a decade.
There were, of course, the obligatory visits with much-missed family and friends. And, for the self-confessed foodie, a lot of menus to check out in Melbourne’s restaurant scene.
While she’s now back in LA, the Australian actor is still catching up. “I’ve just started watching Offspring,” she tells Stellar. “Kat Stewart is just incredible. And Asher Keddie. It’s such a love letter to Melbourne.”
Having been warned that she’ll need to brace herself for one of Australian television’s most heartbreaking deaths, Dee declares excitedly: “Listen, I’m not afraid of sadness.
I’m one of those people who, if I’m feeling sad, I play the sad song. And then I will play it again until I am really sad. I can’t wait.”
Dee was inspired to start binge-watching the series after working with one of its producers, Imogen Banks, on her new series Safe Home.
The drama about a law firm specialising in family violence cases co-stars Virginia Gay and Mabel Li and will screen next year on SBS.
It’s the second project to bring her home to work in recent years. The other is Sissy, a genre-bending horror movie which, for once, leaves viewers rooting for the serial killer rather than the victims.
“If the horror genre was a f*cked-up Disney movie, then it would be this movie,” Dee says with a laugh.
“And my character felt really different, like a departure from The Bold Type, which I love.”
In that hit dramedy, about three friends working in the high-stakes world of high-fashion magazine publishing, Dee played the uber-confident Kat, who wielded social media as her weapon.
In Sissy, she is an influencer – albeit one who hides childhood insecurities behind a glossy facade on Instagram. At least until she snaps.
“I love the way that they kind of explored the fracture between reality and what we put on our social media,” she says of the film.
“[And] how those two things can be so separate from one another, and shedding a light on how that feels.”
“We’re not offering any solutions,” she continues. “It’s not an after-school special so there’s no moral lesson at the end of it.
But it was nice to read something that felt like the most accurate representation of, like, social anxiety, and especially the anxiety around social media – like pressure to post and to have posts look a certain way.”
As someone who has struggled with social anxiety, Dee limits how much time she spends online, saying that she feels her healthiest when she’s not sitting on her phone, absent-mindedly scrolling through Instagram or Twitter.
“I think that no matter who you are, social media is a hard thing to escape now,” the 29-year-old tells Stellar. “Whether you’re running a business or you’re just chilling, doing whatever you’re doing, it’s permeated society in such a huge way.”
Before filming Sissy just outside of Canberra in 2020, the Gold Coast-raised Dee hadn’t worked in Australia since moving to the US when she was 17.
“I would have loved to have stayed in Australia but, unfortunately, at that time, there were limited opportunities for people of colour,” she explains.
“I just didn’t quite fit the idea of what an Australian girl would look like – which isn’t accurate at all. But I can see that’s really evolving and changing in a very rapid way.
“And I think it’s about time, because it’s not the Australia that I know,” she adds.
“It shouldn’t be just this one-note thing because everyone isn’t blonde and carrying a surfboard. There’s so much more to Australia than that, and I’m just grateful to be part of the change.”
As a child, Dee often felt like an outsider because no-one onscreen looked like her. Already feeling isolated, she often kept to herself.
It wasn’t until she landed her first acting role in 2008, at the age of 14, on the teen drama series The Saddle Club that she felt like she had finally found a place where she could let her guard down.
“This probably sounds weird but the calmest I feel is when I’m on set – it’s the closest thing I have to a home,” she explains.
It was at “home” on the Canadian set of The Bold Type that Dee found a friendship akin to sisterhood with co-stars Meghann Fahy and Katie Stevens. In a case of life imitating art, the three women became just as tight off screen.
Since moving to the US, Dee has worked on many projects, but it was The Bold Type – which has often been described as the millennials’ answer to Sex And The City – that proved to be a game changer.
“I’m not very good at thinking about things in terms of career moves; my brain doesn’t work that way,” she says.
“But I think, on a personal level, that show was so transformative for me, in terms of the way that I moved through the world and [in] my confidence and my ability to let people in. I [had] always had a hard time making friends.”
Dee believes The Bold Type resonated with so many, including herself, because it showcased the very best of female friendship rather than anything catty.
“My friends are my ride or die,” she says of co-stars Fahy and Stevens.
“[Friends are] with you when you fall in love, and they’re down when you fall out
of love. They’re there through the messy break-ups and all of the big moments in life.”
And so, while The Bold Type also followed fashionably-attired friends in the Big Apple, it was without any of the behind-the-scenes acrimony of Sex And The City.
“We’re not that fancy, unfortunately. We’re pretty normal. We love each other. Actually, Meghann is coming to stay with me tomorrow,”
Dee says, explaining that her friend is heading to LA to help her celebrate her recent birthday. “She’s [going to be] sleeping on my day bed.”
Although she lives in youth-obsessed Hollywood, Dee says that while “being
just a whisper away from turning 30” has prompted a “small existential crisis”, she’s ultimately looking forward to getting older.
“One of the bigger lessons of my 20s has been about embracing all of the things that make me a little bit weird,” she reveals.
“I tried to change and it didn’t work, so I think I’m stuck with this personality.
I don’t think it matters who you are – if you’re embracing exactly who you are, then you’re going to be happier.”
Sissy is in cinemas on November 3, with Halloween sneak previews from October 27.
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Originally published as Aisha Dee: ‘I didn’t fit the mould of an Australian girl’
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