Mich BAFT Haela is the TA destroyer
SHE destroyed the competition at the BAFTAS – scooping two of the biggest prizes for the hit series she wrote, directed and starred in.
And as Michaela Coel accepted the gongs for Leading Actress and Best Mini-series for her drama I May Destroy You, she proved why she has been hailed one of the UK’S hottest young talents in years.
Aged 33, she now has two award-winning shows under her belt and even had the guts to turn down a £700,000 offer from Netflix after they demanded full rights to her work.
It’s quite a journey for the star, who grew up on a council estate in east London and has had to deal with racism and sexual assault – I May Destroy you was inspired by Michaela’s experience of being raped after her drink was spiked.
Born Michaela Ewuraba Boakye-collinson to Ghanian immigrant parents who split up before she was born, she was raised in one of only a handful of black families on the estate.
Her mum Marion, who was Michaela’s date to the BAFTAS, worked as a mental health liaison officer and she was raised alongside older sister Jasmine.
In 2007 she won a place at the University of Birmingham but, aged 18, she dropped out to devote herself to religion fulltime after finding God. She then discovered her talent for drama, via open-mic poetry nights. Two years later she earned a spot at London’s prestigious Guildhall School Music Drama.
She was the only black woman they had taken in five years and in a blog she wrote at the of and time, she dubbed herself the “only black girl in the village”. Michaela said she experienced racism at the school, from one teacher using the N-word to another saying her vocal cords were made differently because she was black. One exercise divided the class into two groups – those whose families owned their houses and thos Michaela was the the non-ownersh
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he was pulling rafting the second series of Chewing Gum in 2016 that her drink was spiked and she was sexually assaulted by two men.
She had taken a break to meet a pal at a bar and came back to a hazy consciousness at the office where she had been working, her phone smashed.
Over the next 24 hours she put together the blurry pieces of what had happened and later channelled that into the opening of I May Destroy You.
It tells the tale of Twitterfamous writer Arabella who vows to hunt down the man who drugged and raped her to deliver her own brand of justice.
In 2017 Michaela, who had also appeared in Netflix’s Black Mirror and the BBC’S Black
Earth Rising, for the show.
Netflix offered her £700,000 but the deal fell through when they demanded full rights to the work, which she questioned.
Michaela says: “I guess began to ask questions.
“That’s the difficult bit – daring to ask questions.
“I began to enjoy it. I began to enjoy realising that they thought I was just going to take it, then being like, ‘Surprise bitches, I’m not taking it.’”
Instead, she pitched the show to the BBC, who offered full creative control and the rights.
Michaela holed up in a secluded cabin in the States and wrote 191 drafts of the 12-part series. It aired last summer and pitched the idea
I became a huge hit both in the UK and America.
And speaking after her win on Sunday, a tearful Michaela said the drama had helped her “get past some troubling stuff” and its success had “replaced bad memories with really nice ones”.
So what next for Michaela? While she has ruled out a second series of I May Destroy You, she is in talks to do another show with the BBC and she is releasing a book in September called Misfits, featuring stories from her life.
What’s certain is there’s still plenty more to come from this multitalented star.