Actor Aisha Dee was just 17 years old when she left Australia, moving all the way to the other side of the world in the hope of attending castings where the colour of her skin wasn't remarked on.
After landing gigs on a few lesser-known American TV series, she found her feet as one of the leads of The Bold Type, a cult hit that ran from 2017 to 2021. It's a vacuous show on its surface, about three young women working at a women's magazine in New York City, but was buoyed by the charm of its three leads (among them Meghann Fahy, who would go on to win legions of fans in The White Lotus's second season) and was unafraid to go deep with storylines about representation, reproductive health and discrimination.
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Dee played Kat Edison, the magazine's social media director, who finds herself, in the show's first season, exploring her sexuality with a Muslim photographer named Adena (Nikohl Boosher).
It was, in many ways, a dream role for the young actor.
By 2020, however, Dee was feeling dissatisfied: "I remember screaming at my computer reading the scripts," she tells ABC Arts.
In a letter initially sent internally to the show's producers and then made public on the actor's Instagram, she described a storyline in which Kat had a dalliance with a Republican woman as "confusing and out of character".
She also alleged that the show lacked diversity behind the scenes.
"I felt such a deep love for my communities and the people that I had the privilege of representing on that show. But it came with a lot of responsibility and not really a lot of autonomy," Dee told ABC RN's Stop Everything! recently.
"I felt like I owed it to the young queer people watching the show, [and] to the young Black women who see themselves in Kat [to say something]."
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Speaking up, particularly in a public forum, wasn't easy: "I was absolutely terrified … I remember feeling like I was gonna have diarrhoea for the rest of my life. I knew that there were potential consequences," says Dee.
Responding to Dee's criticisms, the show's producers wrote: "We applaud Aisha for raising her hand and starting conversations around these important issues. We look forward to continuing that dialogue and enacting positive change."
Reflecting on the confrontation, Dee told ABC Arts she was grateful to have had the support of the studio, network and producers.
"There were many positive changes, and there is still much more work to be done."
For Dee, speaking up also marked a career turning point: "Since that moment, I've made really conscious choices to do things that scare me, and to move towards the things that give me butterflies and the things that make my hands shake."
After The Bold Type wrapped, she returned to Australia, where she took roles in indie horror film Sissy (released in November 2022) and SBS series Safe Home, which focuses on family violence.
"Safe Home was one of those things [that felt scary]. I was terrified to take this job, I almost didn't, because I just wasn't sure if I could do it. I wasn't sure if I felt worthy … I was scared to go to those emotional places," Dee says.
Dee's whole life and career appears to be riding this line between fear and bravery, and her turn in Safe Home is a testament to her ability to skilfully bring humour and nuance to dark subject matter.
The series is also a sign that the industry that rebuffed Dee over a decade ago is finally changing.
Leaving home
Dee was a confident kid, and knew she wanted to be an actor when she was quite young: "I was a really obnoxious child and acting seemed like the right path to go down."
She describes herself as biracial; her father is African American and her mother is white Australian.
Growing up on the Gold Coast during the 90s, raised by her mother, she rarely saw people who looked like her – but she did see them on TV.
"I saw myself in the kids on Sesame Street … they had business owners and mothers and fathers and kids that were of all different races. And there was something about that that just felt so safe to me," she says.
"I genuinely found a lot of escape in movies and TV shows and plays and the world of make-believe, because it felt like a safer place to exist."
Dee was an only child at the time, and would spend hours amusing herself while her mother, an opera singer, worked in a music shop or took vocal lessons.
"I developed this really vivid and intense inner world; I was just playing out everything I had seen in my favourite movies, and imagining myself in there," she says.
Dee found her first agent in the Yellow Pages, and by 14 she had moved to Melbourne to join the cast of iconic 00s Australian children's series The Saddle Club. It was her first audition.
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"I had no resources or any real way of actually entering the film industry. It's weird now, I don't really know how it happened, but I feel incredibly grateful."
At the same time, she describes it as a challenging experience.
"I felt quite insecure on The Saddle Club, if I'm honest. I was around a lot of the other kids who had taken acting class … I didn't really know what I was doing," she recalls.
She used the money she made from doing the show to pay for dance and acting classes, which her mum hadn't been able to afford.
Even with this training, however, Dee found there were few jobs for someone who looked like her.
As she told the SMH in 2022: "I was actively told by people in the industry that there wasn't anything for me here and that I should leave."
So at 17, she relocated to Los Angeles.
"That must have been a different girl that did that, because now I'm afraid," she tells ABC Arts.
Coming home
A few years ago, as shooting for The Bold Type's final series was coming to an end, Dee told her US team that she wanted to work in Australia again, to be closer to her little sister. In 2020, she received the script for Sissy, a horror film by Australian writer-directors Hannah Barlow and Kane Senes. She was initially offered a supporting role, but found herself connecting to the titular character — so she decided to go for it.
"I was trying to channel the younger me, who wasn't afraid," Dee says.
Still, her expectations were low, given the dearth of African Australian protagonists in local films.
"I was like: 'It's Australia, they are never, ever going to hire me to be the lead character,'" she recalls.
"I was so surprised that they went for it. That was also probably the first indicator to me that things were changing here."
Sissy became her first gig back in Australia after a decade, winning her an AACTA Awards nomination. Safe Home soon followed.
On the sets of both, Dee was surrounded on and off screen with other people of colour, as well as disabled, gender diverse and queer people.
"The thing that I really noticed the most on the sets of Sissy and Safe Home [was that] I was no longer the only one. I was not expected to represent all queer people or all Black people in Australia. That's really the first time I've experienced that," she says.
"I wasn't expected to fulfil a need so that the film or the TV show is palatable to today's audience, which expects me to look a certain way."
The change is more noticeable to Dee, having spent so much time away.
"Now I look around at the young actors coming up out of Australia, and I know that 13 years ago when I left, there wouldn't have been these spaces for us," she says.
Dee names Heartbreak High's Chika Ikogwe, Ayesha Madon and James Majoos, as well as her Safe Home co-star Mabel Li, as examples of a new wave of screen talent.
"Maybe the next generation of young artists and actors coming up in the industry in Australia won't have to hear the same things I heard in casting offices; maybe they won't have to be told that they shouldn't go in the sun because they might get too dark, and 'I like you being light'," she says.
She reiterates that there's still a long way to go, however: "I would like to say it's a thing of the past that doesn't happen anymore. But unfortunately, it does. But having said that … in terms of Australia, I've seen so much change."
Making Safe Home
Despite her fears in taking on Safe Home, Dee was immediately reassured when she met with creator Anna Barnes, producers Imogen Banks and Emelyne Palmer, and director Stevie Cruz-Martin.
Barnes (Retrograde; Content) worked as a communications officer in a family violence centre, and the series draws on that intimate knowledge of the sector, as well as extensive research.
Dee plays Phoebe, who has recently left a communications job at a high-end law firm to work for a family violence legal centre and help them get the word out about their pivotal work.
"I play a character who is a substitute for the audience, because she's coming into this world not knowing a lot about it, and we learn with her," she says.
Barnes told Stop Everything! that Dee brought an emotional depth to the character, while also managing to keep things light.
"I think that often people are either cerebral or emotionally present … [but] Aisha is both, which is fascinating and makes her really engaging to watch," said Barnes.
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Working on Safe Home has made Dee realise just how far-reaching and insidious family violence is.
"I think back to just being a kid, the amount of times I would just look the other way and go and play," she reflects.
"One of the really beautiful things about being on Safe Home was that it actually made me feel brave [enough] to go into my own history and to ask the people that I love questions that felt not appropriate before. It made me feel safe to do it … It made me closer to so many people I love; to my mum, to my grandma, to my friends.
"My biggest hope for the show is that people watching feel safe and held and safe enough to explore and ask those questions in their own life as well."
After filming Safe Home, Dee took a needed break to "repair her heart" and spend time with her family.
She's recently been moving in a new, bold and brave direction, releasing a six-track EP of her own music, titled Suitcase.
She's also ready to explore other screen projects.
"Safe Home was a big one for me. It's been hard for me to let it go … but [choosing my next job] is about creative autonomy," she says.
"I want to be really intentional about the work that I do and the stories that I tell; it's important to me what I'm putting out into the world."
Safe Home is available to stream on SBS On Demand.
