MICHAELA COEL
I May Destroy You is the kind of TV that comes around once in a generation. Creator, writer and actor Michaela Coel tracks its journey to instant-classic status
An in-depth interview with the fearless creator/star of I May Destroy You.
THIS YEAR HAS been a lot. For you, for us, for Michaela Coel. So in August, she just needed to get out. Of her flat, of London. After deciding that she’d simply head wherever “they would let me go”, she took two (negative) Covid tests, booked a flight, landed in Iceland, quarantined for five days, hired a car, got in, Googled “beautiful places to see in Iceland”, and every other day would drive to a place, any place.
The months since March, the beginning days of lockdown, had been busy. Coel was still supervising the edit of the final episodes of I May Destroy You just as the very first episodes aired on the BBC. They’d always known the schedule would be tight, but then the pandemic hit and along with it a need to “recalibrate how we were going to do it” (which included actors in Italy doing ADR on their phones when the postal system couldn’t deliver mics).
While critics and audiences raved about what they were watching, the radical, remarkable TV playing out across screens, Coel had just one thought in her mind: “We have to finish it, we have to finish it. We’re not finished.” When she was finished, finally, what was left was TV unlike anything we’d ever seen.
Let’s go back to the beginning. You’ve spoken about your own assault, and how that was something you were working through. Would you call all of your work personal?
Yes, yes. And the beginning, I would say, begins not with the assault, but with being alive, being here, being in London, being born in the late ’80s. When London, and really the UK, was going through a huge transition with immigration, and the internet, and being born into those circumstances. [That’s] where I think my art begins. And I think that when a writer, creator writes and writes alone, it’s always personal.
If it’s only you writing it, it is littered with your personhood, your bias, your subjectivity. And I guess I’m doing that in a much more transparent, face-on way.
When did you first write something down that was explicitly I May Destroy You? Or about that experience?
Well, I think that you can have the thought, “I’m going to turn it into a show,” without doing it. And there’s also recording — so for me, I would record a lot. I would record a diary entry. But it’s not explicitly thinking I’m going to make a show. It’s documenting your thoughts and your feelings. So it’s what came first, the chicken or the egg? It’s very hard to really know. When did I explicitly begin writing about myself for the show? It would be after I got the commission.
You mentioned it publicly at the Mactaggart Lecture in 2018. Talk to me about standing on stage and saying that in front of people — traditionally assaults and trauma, especially around sexual violence, can be full of shame.
You know, for me, it was fine. And I think it’s because whatever tradition that is, I’m not a part of it. I don’t have that. I don’t share that tradition. And I don’t know why I don’t share that tradition. But I’d rehearse it at home with my housemate. But this happens, when I write something that’s very, very... even if it’s not actually about me, if I just feel it very much, I can’t get through it without crying. I have to keep rehearsing it to try and get the tears away. And then it was fun to be able to share in such a confident way. I enjoyed it. I think that the Mactaggart Lecture obviously contained very traumatic information. But I tried, as
I do with the show, to also pair it with lightness and make people laugh whilst also delivering stark information.
And so the commission, was that the BBC and HBO coming in together at that point?
Yeah. So this was actually after I’d been talking about the [fact] that I wanted to make a show about this. I hadn’t actually done any writing about it; I was just talking. So I had gone in to meet HBO long before, I think it was in 2017 — so only a year after I was assaulted — to say I wanted to do a show. And looking back now, I think that I was still in some sort of shock. And [HBO exec] Amy Gravitt, maybe she didn’t say it explicitly, but I feel that she perhaps knew that I wasn’t ready. Then there was the stint with Netflix, which we all know, I lost interest in because of the exploitative nature of it. I’d been working with the BBC on Black Earth Rising. And I think they had heard about my problems with Netflix. And so I got a message from Piers [Wenger, Controller Of Drama] that said, “Come and talk to us about your idea.” And so I did. And I just did my talk. “I want to do a show about this. I know what the end looks like. And the beginning is that I was assaulted.” And then they emailed me basically saying, “However you want to do this and however much of the IP rights you want to keep, keep them. We want to do it on your terms, [in] your voice.” And so I was doing it. Then we met with HBO because we needed American investment. We went to America for two days and my final meeting was with HBO, and I had a crazy moment of walking in and seeing Amy. And she said, “Hello, do you remember me?” And suddenly, I remembered being there in 2017, talking about the fact that I was assaulted, I wanted to make a show. And you suddenly realise how much you’ve changed. And maybe grown. There was no other choice for me, they were just very... they’re perfect. Just, it was right, it was very right to go with HBO. I knew as soon as I left the building, they were the ones I was going to do it with.
As well as ownership, it was presumably also about creative freedom? It sounds like they completely trusted in your vision for whatever this was going be.
Netflix, to their credit, also did trust very much in my vision. And I think creative control is great. But I think for me, receiving the creative control, now that I have it, what I like to do is kind of share it. Because I don’t know how to operate a camera. I’m only one brain and you need feedback. So they did give me creative control whilst also really thinking and giving me notes and thoughts and showing me where they were confused. So yeah, but yes, creative control in the sense that everything went through me and I decided on everything, yes.
Is transparency important as well? I’m just thinking in terms of filmmakers, such as yourself, being transparent about money attached to deals. So other female filmmakers or Black females or workingclass filmmakers, or just any filmmaker who wants to be treated and paid fairly, has that