THE RISE OF MICHAELA COEL
Boyd Hilton on how the creator of I May Destroy You became a worldwide TV sensation
When I interviewed Michaela Coel back in 2018, she told me she was working on a new TV series. “I’m really excited about it,” she explained. “I can’t say much, but this is going to be my big thing based on real events and I’m going to be in it. I’m going to the cringiest of the cringey. So much weird shit. It’s dark and funny, and super-womany.” That show ended up being her 12-part drama I May Destroy You, which reaches its climax this week and is, for many of us, the best thing on TV this year. A few months after that interview, Coel delivered the prestigious keynote Mactaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh TV Festival, during which she told a stunned audience that she had been drugged and sexually assaulted during a night out in 2016 on the eve of a writing deadline. It was this trauma that formed the basis for I May Destroy You, as raw and unflinching a look at issues of consent, sex and relationships as we’ve ever seen on TV. Yet the first fruits of Coel’s creativity could not have been more different.
CHRISTIAN POETRY
In her late teens, Coel was “a Christian poet person”, as she put it. “I had God under my skin,” she told me when I interviewed her, and poetry was her way of expressing her religious feelings. When she boldly performed her spoken-word poetry at an open-mic night, she loved the experience. And, while she’s not deeply religious any more, that burst of self-expression led to her crucial decision to drop out of her non-creative course at the University of Birmingham, and instead enrol at the legendary Guildhall School of Music and
Drama in London. She was the first black woman to be accepted there in five years.
CHEWING GUM DREAMS
Coel didn’t find the experience of being a working-class black woman at Guildhall easy, but it did lead to the life-changing creation of Chewing Gum Dreams, her monologue written from the point of view of a 14 year old living on an east London estate, which she wrote for her finalyear project. Coel expanded the piece and eventually went on to perform it at the National Theatre, where she was spotted by TV bigwigs and asked to turn the show into a sitcom.
When resulting series Chewing Gum arrived on E4 in 2015, it was instantly clear that Coel was a major talent who had created that rare thing – a TV series about a working-class black woman’s world. She won two Baftas for the show, and a second run was commissioned.
DESTROYING THE BOUNDARIES
As well as creating her own highly acclaimed sitcom, Coel also became a sought-after actor. She dazzled in two episodes of Black Mirror, and after a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo in Star Wars: The Last Jedi in 2017, she faced her biggest acting challenge yet, taking on the lead role in eight-part BBC2 political thriller Black Earth Rising, as a lawyer and survivor of the rwandan genocide. In sharp contrast, she was also the lead in 2018 romantic musical Been So Long.
If there’s one factor that links all these projects, it’s Coel’s extraordinary fearlessness. Whether performing her
Christian poetry as a teenager; playing all the roles in Chewing Gum Dreams; speaking out in Edinburgh about her experience of sexual assault; or creating, starring in and co-directing the uniquely audacious I May Destroy You, complete with its unflinchingly real scenes of a sexual nature, Coel always treads her own uncompromising path, tests the boundaries and dares to tell her own truth.
I May Destroy You, fêted by critics and audiences both here and in the US, where it airs on HBO, feels like the culmination of that urge to speak out and show us the brutal, messy, funny realities of life. It truly feels like the “big thing” she described in that 2018 interview. For Coel, the future looks boundless, and even bigger things will surely come. n
I May Destroy You finishes on BBC1, Tuesday 14 July, and all 12 episodes are on BBC iplayer now
‘For Coel, the future looks boundless’