Aisha Dee on The Bold Type and moving to LA: ‘Australia has a long way to go in terms of diversity’ – The Guardian

For Aisha Dee, even idyllic places are shaped by codes that dictate who belongs. When she was growing up on Australias Gold Coast, strangers would stop her because of how she looked. Shes 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 didnt 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 shes 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 womens 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 shows 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 shows moral centre.
Kat has this strong sense of justice that really drives a lot of her choices, says Dee. She runs for city council and she took a chance on love in a way that I find really inspiring.
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.)
Theres a lot of wish fulfilment on the show, Dee says. It presents this idea of this is what it can be.
On television, its still rare to witness a character of colour whos allowed to be messy, for whom identity isnt a finite destination but an endless set of questions. In season four, Kat posts her bosss tax returns on social media when she finds out that he donates to a homophobic senator. Shes 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, Scarlets 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

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