For Aisha Dee, even idyllic places are shaped by codes that dictate who belongs. When she was growing up on Australia’s Gold Coast, strangers would stop her because of how she looked. She’s never forgotten it.
“1990s Gold Coast was the heyday of Movie World and Dreamworld and honestly it was a very special place to grow up,” says the actor, who has an Anglo Australian mother and African American father. “But I didn’t see myself anywhere. If I was walking down the street with my mum, people would ask if I was lost. For a lack of a better term, you feel a bit like a black sheep.”
Dee, 26, is speaking to Guardian Australia from Los Angeles, where she’s lived since she was 17. She takes time to think about her responses, which she punctuates with infectious peals of laughter. Like Kat Edison, the queer, biracial social media director she plays on The Bold Type – a hit comedy about three twentysomething best friends who work at fictional women’s title Scarlet – Dee comes across as open and unvarnished, uninterested in sanding off edges.
One of the pleasures of watching The Bold Type is the way the show’s facade of glossy, magazine-world escapism – set at a New York publication loosely based on Cosmopolitan – is a front for a serious exploration of younger millennial womanhood.
Jane Sloan (Katie Stevens), a star feature writer diagnosed with a breast cancer gene, reveals to her colleagues while in the fashion closet her plans to freeze her eggs. Working-class Sutton (Meghann Fahy) worries about pursuing fashion, a career that mostly pays in champagne launches. Kat, in many ways, is the show’s moral centre.
Early in the show, Kat is arrested for assault after protecting her love interest, Adena (Nikohl Boosheri) – a Muslim lesbian photographer – from a racial slur. In the latest season, she uses her platform at Scarlet to help a trans woman run as herself in the New York City Marathon. (A May 2019 essay by Jia Tolentino in the New Yorker describes The Bold Type as a “woke fantasy of magazine journalism”.)
“There’s a lot of wish fulfilment on the show,” Dee says. “It presents this idea of ‘this is what it can be.’”
On television, it’s still rare to witness a character of colour who’s allowed to be messy, for whom identity isn’t a finite destination but an endless set of questions. In season four, Kat posts her boss’s tax returns on social media when she finds out that he donates to a homophobic senator. She’s fired and finds work as a bartender at The Belle, an Instagram-ready social club.
The Belle suspiciously resembles the Wing, the New York City co-working space which, according to allegations in a March New York Times report, has not always been welcoming or empowering place for all of its diverse employees. (The Bold Type often mirrors life in media; in season three, as the magazine pivots to online-only, Scarlet’s much-loved editor Jacqueline Carlyle (Melora Hardin) is replaced by a head of digital who meditates at his desk and greets colleagues with “namaste”.)
“It is inspiring to see [Kat] make a misstep and act really impulsively,” Dee say. “I’m often like, ‘Oh my gosh, why are you doing that?’ The Bold Type makes space for Kat to fail, and learn from that. The trajectory of a career is not a linear thing.”
Dee grew up with her mother, an opera singer, who’s the oldest of 13 children. “My aunties’ and uncles’ kids are like my brothers and sisters.” Watching television and movies, she says, held a “spiritual” power. Sesame Street was an early touchstone. “There were families who were all different colours and from all different walks of life,” she says. “Something about that motivated me.”
At 14, she was hired to play Desiree Biggins on The Saddle Club, the Australian adaptation of Bonnie Bryant’s wildly successful teen book series. She relocated to Melbourne, moving in with her co-stars Ariel Kaplan and Marny Kennedy.
“I had no experience as an actor and that was my first audition,” she says. “[My co-stars and I] are really close to this day – we have Zoom happy hours.”
Dee says that her experience of puberty was exacerbated by the challenges of navigating an industry that can be “bizarre and subjective”.
“In Australia, I wasn’t really getting the opportunities that my peers were getting,” she says of her decision to move to LA in 2009. “I love being on set so much and wanted so badly to be there. As much as I’d been super-lucky, my gut was telling me to make the move and the pieces fell into place. I think Australia has a long way to go in terms of the diversity you see in the other parts of the world.”
Dee, who has been open about her struggles with anxiety, says The Bold Type came into her life during a period where she felt like she was “floating”.
“There are things in your life that make you feel secure – and a lot of those had been stripped away before we started,” she says. “Playing Kat specifically has motivated me to find my voice a little more, to be brave like Kat is.”
The friendship between Kat, Jane and Sutton is The Bold Type’s central love story. The show nails the way that, in your 20s, friends can become family – a source of endless support among the cultural and economic forces that can shake romantic relationships and career ambitions.
“A core part of that is really about honesty,” Dee says. “It’s about calling each other out and lifting each other up.”
Dee would like to see Kat find love and her queer community. “My wish is to see Kat in some queer spaces, to go on that journey with her. And I’d like to see her in a successful relationship.
“I can’t count the number of times that people have told me that watching Kat’s story has inspired them to come out to their families or tell someone that they love them,” she says. “It [sounds] soppy and sentimental but it really means so much to me. I have to pinch myself.”
