It’s midday on a Saturday in Sydney’s Eastern Suburbs, and I’m sitting with Aisha Dee and Dylin Hardcastle on the sunny patio of Aisha’s temporary apartment. We’ve just come back from the deli across the road, loaded up with sandwiches and pickles.

DYLIN I can’t believe we live so close. It’s so good.
AISHA I wanted to be close to my friends.

Aisha, who calls LA home, is back in Australia to work on a miniseries, grateful to be home and staying just two streets over from Dylin. Between bites of food and plenty of laughs, Aisha and Dylin get candid, the conversation flowing effortlessly as they discuss connection, queerness, storytelling, and the future.

PART I CONNECTION

AD I moved to the other side of the world when I was 17. I resented this place because it represented so much weird trauma for me, and I had to distance myself from it. It took leaving to truly appreciate all the beautiful things I have here now. Having connection and community can change the city you live in. For a long time, I struggled to find community in LA. To be fair, I wasn’t really trying. I had resigned myself to the fact—maybe out of insecurity—that I didn’t even want to make friends. But I’m getting braver now and starting to put myself out there. LA has become what it is for me because of the people I’ve found there. Sydney is what it is for you right now because of the people you have here.

DH Totally. I’ve never had community in the city like I do now. I don’t know if you’ve felt this way, but when I hadn’t fully come into myself, as I have now, I wasn’t able to connect with people on a deeper level. 

AD Yeah, I was willing to shift and change myself for anyone. I would say that I was a tomboy a lot of the time. There are days when I feel more masculine, but the reality is, I’m a femme little bitch… I think I pushed that down.

PART II STORIES

DH The way we both tell stories is world-building. It’s a way to imagine the futures in which we want to live and to resist
old narratives.

AD Exactly, stories completely challenge your perception of the world. And I love that they’re a conversation too—it’s how we communicate with each other.

DH I really love what you’re saying about it being a conversation; all the best stories are a dialogue. They ask questions, and when we ask questions of people, it generates the curiosity to bring their own answers or questions to it.

AD All the characters I play, I think they’re real people; they exist in the words on the page. Every time I finish a project, I feel like I have to write them a letter to say thanks for everything they taught me. It’s my job to ensure that people understand why they made the questionable choices they did, because maybe I made that same bad choice. I’m emotionally empathetic to what they are going through.

DH I think all the characters I wrote in my book, A Language of Limbs, are real too.