“White women are back,” writer, comedian, and actor Aida Osman says matter-of-factly when I tell her I’ve recently been enjoying Ryan Murphy’s FX series Feud. (“For work purposes,” I qualify.) The comment is a little biting, considering that only two weeks have passed since HBO announced it was canceling Issa Rae’s Rap Sh!t, the series Osman also starred in and wrote for, after just two seasons.
Rap Sh!t told the story of high school friends from Miami who pursue a career as a female rap duo, a fictionalized retelling of the City Girls’ career. Cancellation of the series has reawakened dialogue about the perceived lack of value studios place on projects that center Black stories. “When I got the news, I was like, ‘This makes sense,’” the New Hollywood 2024 inductee tells Teen Vogue. “It makes sense in the way that nothing is guaranteed for Black people in Hollywood, and we have to consistently fight for our stories.”
A moment before I mentioned Feud, Osman jokingly threatened to throw her peppermint tea across the bar if I named Rap Sh!t as my favorite of recent shows. Truthfully, though, I will always appreciate the characters Shawna and Mia for giving us the somewhat suspect empowerment anthem, “Seduce and Scheme.” In the aftermath of Rap Sh!t's cancellation, Osman is now at peace with the show's outcome, but the decision was (and is) cutting.
“I'm a Cancer, man. I'm sensitive as hell. Right now there's a tag on my jacket itching me and I'm going to start crying,” quips the 27-year-old. I laugh, but she’s serious. “Although you can tell yourself all of the therapeutic stuff, what really can come up in the dark moments is, I'm not enough. That curse can replay in your head until you start to believe it."
Osman continues, “I’m fighting that curse and trying to believe a different story, but it's really hard when the world shows you the opposite of what you think to be true of yourself.”
What’s true about Osman is that long before she moved to Los Angeles, before she began writing on shows like Big Mouth and Betty, and before Rap Sh!t changed the trajectory of her life and career, and despite her quick comedic timing, she wasn’t a class clown. She was a quiet kid growing up in Lincoln, Nebraska, the child of Eritrean refugees. She and her brother, Sam, who died in 2017, were born just 11 months apart. She credits her big heart to her younger brother, who was born autistic, nonverbal, and epileptic.
Osman knew early on that she was a writer, and she was always the first to raise her hand in class. She studied philosophy at the University of Nebraska, and then opted out of law school — “My answer to the immigrant-mother problem,” as she puts it — to pursue stand-up comedy. She told her mom, “Give me one year.”
In that year Osman worked at a group home and started writing every night, pacing in the living room while the people she was watching slept. “All of that is garbage," she says now of that early writing. "When I go read all of that back, it's all premises, no punchlines, all bad stories. But it's cool to say I was trying.”
Osman relocated to New York and continued doing stand-up. Then a comedian who worked on Big Mouth saw her set and offered up her name as a hire on the animated Netflix sitcom. She moved to Hollywood and took a gig as a cohost on the pop culture criticism podcast Keep It, alongside Ira Madison III and Louis Virtel.
Osman saw academics, sees comedy, sees life, as a game. “And I don't mean the competitive, make money, be-the-best sh*t,” she says. “I mean the game of life. Making someone laugh, getting the right answer, matching the right sweater with the right shoe. I like this sh*t a lot. I like being alive.” It’s a game she takes seriously.
I invited Osman to meet at the Lobby Bar of the West Hollywood Edition Hotel on a Friday evening before I knew she is newly sober, hence her peppermint tea. She’s embarking on sobriety with her partner, the musician Earl Sweatshirt, and a few friends. “I'd been wanting to stop drinking my whole life,” she says. “From the moment I started, I was like, ‘This is not supposed to go in my body.’”
Osman has a clear sense of self and strong views about the world and her place in it. But she’s not so set in her ways that she can’t embrace new modes of thinking and becoming. “I like conversation. I like people's ideas. I like healthy arguing,” she says. “One of the most vital parts of philosophy was that you had to have strong opinions. You had to refute other people's opinions, and you had to add something new.”
Rap Sh!t was Osman's first major role onscreen, and she conquered a number of fears stepping into Shawna’s often over-confident shoes. First she landed a job as a writer on the show, in 2022, but the more her colleagues commented about her similarities with the aspiring music star, the more seriously Osman took the possibility of playing the part. She didn’t tell anyone she was auditioning.
“Being a writer for the show was already such a massive win for me that I thought I was being greedy for even wanting to be in the show,” Osman confesses. “My dream was to write. My dream of acting has come to me over the course of the last two years. I'm letting it build and giving myself up to that opportunity because I used to be scared.”
She faced another hurdle on the show: acting out sex scenes, some of which she actually wrote. “It was equal parts awkward and empowering. At a certain point, people had to start reminding me to put my robe back on,” she recalls, laughing. “As a thicker woman, we spend a lot of our time monitoring our body. Is the shirt tucked into this roll? Do I need to zip up my zipper? Am I sweating? There's always something. So, it was really nice to have no clothes on, because then it was like, everything is just hanging. There are no clothes to adjust.”
Growing up, Osman says, she never thought about her size, before she makes a point we can both relate to: “Losing weight will show you people are not sh*t.” Few people realize that constantly being told how much better you look in a slimmer body, as if you aren't the same person who once took up more space, isn't quite the positive affirmation they think it is.
She continues, “When I was in high school, I probably weighed about 230, 240. Literally, I [had] never in my life felt big,” she says. “The first time I felt big was when I was about to film a sex scene for Rap Sh!t. Somebody saw me drinking a coffee and they were like, ‘Oh, I know you're not eating. You’ve got a sex scene today.’ I said, ‘What?’ And they were like, ‘Most actresses don't want to look bloated in the scene.’ I said, ‘If you don't pass me 300 bananas right now, I'm about to pull up blimp-y,’” Osman recalls, before declaring something that has now become obvious: “I'm a rebel at heart. You're not going to tell me I can't eat. I'm only going to tell me I can't eat if I don't want to eat.”
Speaking up for herself and others hasn’t always been well received. Osman says she’s been labeled “difficult” on set after requesting things like better working conditions for background actors. A former boss once told her that she was asking for too much on set. “At the time I didn't have the confidence to advocate for myself and say, ‘No, this is what happened,’” she says. “You just get kind of paralyzed by fear.”
Osman’s experience resembles that of many Black actors, such as Taraji P. Henson, Keke Palmer, and Issa Rae, who’ve expressed feeling torn between self-advocacy and self-preservation in Hollywood. “Black people are getting paid disproportionately smaller amounts of money, and that is a shame, but I don't know how to fight it,” says Osman. “I don't always have the bravery somebody like Issa or Taraji has because of their age and their context and their success. Of course, I'll scream from the mountaintops, ‘Pay Black women more money! Pay Black creators more money!’ But it doesn't feel like people are listening.”
Osman’s words reinforce an earlier statement she made about the kind of durability the entertainment industry requires of her: “As a Black woman in this field, as a queer woman in this field, as a woman in this field, as a pragmatic, practical, reasonable person, I'm always bracing for something awful to happen. I'm always preparing myself for the amount of resilience I need to have, because nothing is guaranteed.”
Writing is Osman’s true love. It’s one of the reasons auditioning for roles didn't appeal to her initially, she explains, noting that her reaction to a script was often, “Shouldn't I just write a character that I actually want to play instead of trying to morph myself into somebody that I don't resonate with?"
In 2022, she guest-starred as Malika, a Black Muslim girl, on Ramy Youssef’s Hulu comedy series, Ramy. It was the first time Osman got to play a character of the same faith in which she was raised. She considers Youssef, an Egyptian stand-up comedian, to be one of the greats that she’s worked with: “His show helped shift the general feeling about Muslim people in this country.”
Osman hopes to do the same with a script she's currently writing about her experiences growing up in Nebraska. She describes the project as “American Gangster meets Ramy meets Ozark meets Girlfriends.” And for the record, she's pretty damn proud of being a native Nebraskan.
“I think it's super corny to hate where you're from,” she says. “I love where I'm from. It shaped me. It's the reason I know hundreds of Coldplay songs. It's also the reason I had to look up every song by TLC, SWV, and Mobb Deep. I had to find Black culture, and then hold it very dearly because it wasn't always accessible to me. I built my own attachment to it.”
Last year she taught a screenwriting course in Brooklyn at Babel Loft, a Black-owned membership club. The attendees, about 40 to 50 Black women, ran the gamut from aspiring writers and short-film directors to chefs and lawyers. It was a key moment for Osman, who realized how confident and inspired she feels when teaching and helping people with writing.
There’s also an incredible responsibility that comes with the pen, she adds. “I think actors learn how to find beauty in the art of interpreting people's words, but there's so much power in choosing what your character says and having the final say,” she points out. “You get to choose what stories are told, and you get to choose what the project believes.”
As fervent as Osman is about her work, she embodies a natural ease and fluidity with nearly everything else. For instance, when I ask about her current spiritual practice, Osman jokes, “I've been all types of shit. I've been Muslim, I've been atheist, I've been mad, I've been Catholic.”
Osman has a similar laissez faire attitude about her gender identity, on which she's gone back and forth publicly. “I realized the nonbinary identity is just a helpful label for people who don't feel included in the normative divisions that our society has — woman and man, girl and boy. It stresses you out," she says, "having to fit into one of these things, so you take on this kind of nongender identity, which is nonbinary.” She has previously used they and she pronouns but is currently using she/her.
She adds, “I've struggled to explain it to a lot of people. And by a lot of people, I mean my mother. I told her it mostly means I'm washing my hands of whatever y'all tried to put on us because I feel liberated when I'm out of the structures.”
Rap Sh!t has been canceled, but now Osman’s career can enter a new era, built on all she has learned and wants to learn. She likes where she is in life, putting creative energy into her own projects and bouncing ideas around with a trusted group of friends who help cultivate her talent.
“I'm still just a writer and actor, but I want that to change,” Osman says. “I want to make sure that I have access and pull in a way where I can tell the stories that I want to tell and not sacrifice the art. I want to tell very specific stories about Black people, about African people, about people from the Midwest — about my people. I can't let fear sabotage that, because those are pure intentions, and my job as the artist is to have pure intentions.”
As Osman continues to build a name for herself in the entertainment industry, there’s one thing she’s certain she does not want to become: an A-list celebrity. “I'm from the generation of 'Forget the fame, give me the money,'” she says, expressing solidarity with a sentiment that’s been recited in countless rap lyrics over the years. “I'm just looking for the ability to do this for a long time, and if fame is part of that, so be it. But if it's not, it's a lot more peaceful to not be famous.”
Though Osman is in the throes of figuring out her next career move, perhaps prematurely after the sudden end of Rap Sh!t, she remains sure about the ideal level of public notoriety she wants to obtain. “Like a good C- to B-level celebrity,” she says. “That’s enough to get free meals, but not to get pictures taken with you. Free meals, no photos.”
Read all of our New Hollywood 2024 stories below:
- Maddie Ziegler on Dance Moms, New Movie Fitting In & Embracing Hollywood
- Ariana Greenblatt on Barbie, Borderlands, Billie Eilish & Child Stardom
- Keith Powers on Uglies, SAG Strikes, Issa Rae & Finding His Own Lane
- Christopher Briney on Reneé Rapp, Summer I Turned Pretty Season 3 & Hollywood Next Moves
- Aida Osman on Rap Sh!t Cancellation, Black Stories in Hollywood & Facing Acting Fears
- Iñaki Godoy on One Piece, Latinos in Hollywood & Living His Best Life
- Megan Suri on Valentine’s Day, Bollywood & Movie Career Post Never Have I Ever
- The SAG Strike Proved How Unions Help Make Young People’s Dreams Viable
Photo Credits
Photographer Josefina Santos
Lighting Director Brian McGuffog
Gaffer Daniel Patrick
Gaffer Kane Katubig
Digitech Isan Monfort
Retouching Digital Area
Stylist Ian McRae
Stylist Assistant Auden Alblooshi
Stylist Assistant Mason Telles
Hair Stylist for Maddie Ziegler, Megan Suri Candice Birns at A-Frame Agency
Hair Stylist for Aida Osman, Ariana Greenblatt Suzette Boozer at A-Frame Agency
Groomer for Chris Briney, Keith Powers, Iñaki Godoy Melissa DeZarate at A-Frame Agency
Makeup Artist for Maddie Ziegler, Megan Suri Miriam Nichterlein at A-Frame Agency
Makeup Artist for Aida Osman, Ariana Greenblatt Rob Rumsey at A-Frame Agency
HMU Assistant Jenna Lee
Manicurist Rachel Messick
Prop Stylist Annika Fischer
Prop Assistant Elvis Barlow-Smith
Production Hyperion
Design Director Emily Zirimis
Designer Liz Coulbourn
Visual Editor Bea Oyster
Sr. Fashion Editor Tchesmeni Leonard
Associate Fashion Editor Kat Thomas
Assistant Fashion Editor Tascha Berkowitz
Video Credits
Director/Producer Logan Tsugita
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Social Video Director/Producer Ali Farooqui
Director of Creative Dev Mi-Anne Chan
Camera Op Nick Massey Ga
Social Cover Video Editor Lindsey Fink
Site Video Header Editor Crystal Waterton
Editorial Credits
Editor-in-Chief Versha Sharma
Executive Editor Danielle Kwateng
Features Director Brittney McNamara
Talent Director Eugene Shevertalov
Senior Culture Editor P. Claire Dodson
Entertainment News Editor Kaitlyn McNab
Contributing Editor Alyssa Hardy
Associate Director of Audience Development and Analytics Mandy Velez Tatti
Sr. Social Media Manager Honestine Fraser
Social Media Manager Jillian Selzer
Copy Editors Dawn Rebecky and Leslie Lipton
Research Editor Cristina Sada
