Aisha Dee On Carrying Blackness, Pain & Joy As All Political Acts

When Aisha Dee appears on my Zoom screen, she’s laughing before we’ve even started. Her camera is glitching, she’s fiddling with settings, apologising for the chaos of it all. “Give me one second, I just have to make this thing look normal,” she says. Then, after a deep breath: “Okay, I’m present now.”

That word — present — feels like the through-line of our entire conversation.

Because if there’s one thing Dee has fought for, it’s presence: in her body after years of endometriosis pain, in an industry that didn’t always want her, in a culture that often makes Black queer women invisible. Now, at 31, she’s less interested in survival and more in joy.

Her new film One More Shot — which was showing at the Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) in August — is a Y2K rom-com about tequila, time loops and second chances. For Dee, the biggest selling point was simple: “Oh great, I don’t have to cry once,” she grins. The script landed in her lap just weeks after wrapping the heavy Netflix miniseries Apple Cider Vinegar, where she played a character orbiting the scammy wellness world of Belle Gibson. Dee was ready to disappear for a while. “I was honestly kind of exhausted, kind of ready to just take a break,” she says. But then she met director Nicholas Clifford for lunch. “I was completely smitten with him and his vision for the movie. And I thought, maybe it’ll be good for my mental health to do a comedy.”

On-screen, she got to revel in butterfly clips, ’90s nostalgia and the kind of silly chaos she rarely gets cast in. Off-screen, shooting in Melbourne meant rediscovering home as an adult. “I’ve gotten to shoot three things here now, Safe Home, Apple Cider and One More Shot, and it’s been really beautiful,” she says. “In my twenties, I didn’t get to experience Australia at all. Now I feel like I’m reclaiming it.” Between filming, she took herself on long solo drives up the coast. “Driving those windy roads along the ocean where I grew up, I remember feeling so unsettled there as a teenager. Going back as an adult, I just felt… peaceful.”

The film’s theme of do-overs makes Dee reflect on her own what-ifs. What would she say to her 13-year-old self on The Saddle Club set, or her 17-year-old self boarding a plane to Los Angeles? “I look back and I’m envious of how confident that delusional young girl was,” she admits.

Learning to loosen her grip came later, after years of TV sets and relentless schedules. “I went through a crazy period of burnout,” she says. “I’d been so blessed to work a lot, but television can be taxing. It takes from every other part of your life. It got to a point where I had to make a change, because I couldn’t keep working the way I was.”

Now, she chooses balance. She sets a “word of the year” — last year it was community, this year it’s love. Not just romantic love (which she thinks we overvalue as a culture) but platonic, creative, everyday love. “I’ve been leaning into different forms of pleasure and desire outside of romance,” she says. “Romance with my friends. Romance in my work. Dancing even when I’m tired. Moving slowly. Resting when I need it.”

Some of that love is tied to music. Dee has a folder of unreleased tracks sitting on her laptop, songs she’s been “procrastinating” on sharing. “A friend yelled at me recently, like, Aisha, you’ve had music finished for a year, why haven’t you put it out?” she laughs. “And I realised, procrastination is maybe self-protection. But yeah, I just need to be brave and put it on the internet.” Acting lets her channel other people’s words; music is scarier because it’s all her. “It’s a form of creation I have complete autonomy over. That’s terrifying, but I try to do things that scare me.”

The bravest thing she’s done recently wasn’t creative. It was finally confronting the illness she had denied for years. On The Bold Type set, her castmates knew the drill: if Aisha was PMSing, keep a bucket nearby. She pushed through, dismissing doctors’ suspicions of endometriosis. “I didn’t want to believe I had it,” she admits.

By early 2025, the pain was unbearable. During press for Apple Cider Vinegar, she would sit in the car before red carpets with a TENS machine — a small device that sends electrical pulses to block pain signals — strapped to her stomach, swallowing anti-nausea pills, on the verge of tears. “Then I’d get out, smile for photos, and collapse again after.” One night, she woke convinced she was having a heart attack. “I crawled to the bathroom floor, my arms going numb, holding my phone like, do I need to call an ambulance? Maybe I’m dying. And I realised, this is not normal. No one should live like this every month.”

From those cold tiles, she started Googling specialists. Months later, she had surgery. Recovery was brutal, but it also gave her one of the happiest memories of her life. Her mum flew in from Australia to care for her. At first, Dee dreaded it. “I thought, we’re going to kill each other in my one-bedroom apartment,” she laughs. “But it was honestly the most beautiful, joyful time I’ve ever had with my mother.”

They took slow walks, laughed until their stomachs hurt, and reacquainted themselves as adults. One day her mum came home from Target with an air fryer. “She unpacked it at the edge of my bed with so much joy, showing me all the things it could do. That time together was one of the greatest moments of my life.”

Her friend photographed her surgical scars at a pool party, just for her to keep. But when she saw the images, something shifted. “I love my scars. I think they’re so cool and sexy. I feel like a little bionic woman,” she says. She knew a younger version of herself would have felt ugly. And she thought of the women suffering in silence, told their pain was “just depression” or “just periods.” She decided to post.

“I didn’t want it to feel self-indulgent,” she says. “But the response was so beautiful. Friends, strangers, everyone sharing their stories. It made me realise how important it is to talk about it.” Now, endo is her new soapbox. She throws out the racist medical myths, like the long-standing belief that endometriosis was a “white woman’s disease”, which meant Black women’s pain was ignored. “Forty per cent of Black women who were once told they had pelvic inflammatory disease actually had endometriosis,” she says firmly. Sharing hasn’t just built community; it’s freed her. “I’m in a period now where my pain is really low, I’m in remission. So I want to make the most of every day. Be joyful. Be grateful for my body.”

Of course, you can’t talk to Aisha Dee without The Bold Type coming up. She still gets messages from fans who rewatch it every year. Looking back, she calls it a “time capsule” of a very specific moment: 2016 feminism, pussy-hat marches, the branding of girlboss progress.

And the girls? Where would Kat, Jane and Sutton be in 2025? “Probably fighting to keep the magazine alive,” she laughs. “Maybe sharing a studio apartment because toilet paper costs $17 a roll. But honestly, they’d still be telling stories. In whatever form they could.”

Being Kat — the first queer Black female lead many viewers had ever seen — changed Dee’s life. But she’s clear-eyed about the industry. “Sometimes I wonder if I’m being too much,” she says. “But then I remember the artists and activists who came before me. They didn’t shut up. So why should I?” As a Black queer woman, she doesn’t get the luxury of being apolitical. “I don’t have the option of existing in a body that is not political,” she says.

What’s next? A secret new mini-series for Stan, maybe music if she finally presses upload, definitely another trip home for Christmas. But right now, she’s relishing the simple fact of not being in pain every day. “Honestly, I’m just enjoying my life,” she smiles. “That feels like enough.” For an actor who has pushed through so much, industry barriers, burnout, and endometriosis, this isn’t a pause. It’s a second chance. A do-over. A tequila-fuelled time loop of her own.