I don’t know anything about musicals...
Chewing Gum actress Michaela Coel takes on her first leading movie role in Been So Long, a musical set in Camden. She tells LAURA HARDING about why it was time to show a different side to London
MICHAELA COEL has taken her high heels off. The bright green Manolo Blahniks are lined up neatly next to her chair and she is sitting barefoot. “These look really nice but I’m already struggling. Why would I do it to myself?” she asks with a laugh.
“I’ve got short legs so I need them but heels just make you grateful when you’re not in them.”
London-born Michaela, 31, has never shied away from bucking convention.
In fact, she only became an actress when the playwright Che Walker saw her reading a poem and told her she would make a good one.
“He would even let me come to his masterclasses for free and it was through him that I made my first actor friend,” she says.
It seems fitting then that Michaela’s first starring film role is in a bigscreen version of one of his plays, Been So Long, which she saw at the Young Vic theatre in London in 2009 when Che gave her free tickets.
Now the play has been made into a soul-fuelled movie musical and Michaela plays Simone, a single mother who falls for a man just released from prison on a rare night out on the town.
The London it depicts is one we rarely see in cinema, with scenes on the night bus and council estates, plus a musical number in a kebab shop.
It is more reminiscent of Michaela’s Bafta-winning TV show Chewing Gum than anything we have seen in a Richard Curtis film.
“Che is a working-class Camden man and the characters are real,” says Michaela, who also stars in BBC2 drama Black Earth Rising. “He knew these people – they are real, the bars are real, the stories are real, they are his life. It is his take on London.
“I love Richard Curtis films, I love Love Actually, I love Four Weddings and a Funeral and I think every version of London is valid and one shouldn’t exist without the other.
“I call Chewing Gum my baby and this is Che’s baby and what he saw.
“The nice thing about it is very London people were cast and we all had a strong rapport and would improvise all the time, and it was because we know where we are from. “We all came up through Che and we all know what kind of London we are going to show so there was an ease and a fun with that.”
She adds: “We were improvising straight off the bat. So we could come to do take two and have to ask, ‘Do you remember what you said? Let’s go.’
“There is a great fun in that but none of us had filmed in that way before.
“On top of that, it’s a musical.
So it was fun to stretch the muscles.”
Musicals were a relatively alien concept to Michaela before she took on the part in Been So Long, which also required her to dance. “I don’t know anything about musicals,” she admits.
“But I sing and I act and I dance in the clubs so why can’t we blend all those things together and make a different kind of musical?”
That is what director Tinge Krishnan, making her first film since 2011’s Junkhearts, has done. Tinge is one of the “radical thinkers” Michaela says she wants to work with, offering it as the quality she looks for most in collaborators. It helped that Tinge came to the film with fresh eyes, having not seen the stagings of Che’s play.
“As soon as I read it, I thought, ‘I want to see this’. It wasn’t even that I wanted to make it but as a woman and a Londoner I wanted to see it. I was really excited,” she says. “I didn’t have any preconceived ideas of how it would iterate out as a film, having not seen the play, and that was probably good.
“Film is a different medium
– it’s much more immediate and I started getting images in my mind as soon as I was reading it.
“I have seen tons of Che’s other stuff so I knew what he brings in terms of poetry and magic.
“His understanding of the feminine and of the masculine is really quite lovely.
“Those were the kind of themes we could massage in and shape something internal, while theatre is different because it’s louder and more outward.”
The film also allowed Tinge to realise her long-held ambition of devising a musical number in a kebab shop.
“We knew that we didn’t need another Richard Curtis version of London,” she says.
“We didn’t want one, we want one where there are people that we recognise and people that we see.
“Notting Hill felt a bit missing for us, in terms of representation, so that was quite a conscious decision.
“I had always wanted to do a dance sequence in a kebab shop but working with live music and live singing does throw up issues on a low budget.”
Luckily, help came from an unexpected place.
The 2012 film of Les Miserables pioneered a way of making it possible to sing live on set, albeit at a much higher budget level.
“Luckily now the technology is much more accessible,” Tinge says.
“Most of the time, they were singing to click (which keeps the beat) but there were a few we wanted to go free like the Anne Hathaway song in Les Mis.
“While they had a piano in a soundproofed room, we had an electronic keyboard that could then play along so the actors could lead the tempo and we could get a much more real, organic delivery.”
Anne Hathaway would be proud.
■ Been So Long is in cinemas and on Netflix on Friday.
We knew that we didn’t need another Richard Curtis version of London...
Been So Long director Tinge Krishnan, right