'I feel joy': how Bisha K Ali went from struggling standup to Marvel maestro
Before she became a Marvel screenwriter, Bisha K Ali was just another British standup struggling to get a gig. Before that, she was a domestic violence support worker, and before that a data scientist. And for almost all of that time, she was also completely broke – so broke, in fact, that in 2017 Ali found herself being offered an extortionate amount of money to make a Christmas card for Deborah Frances White, host of The Guilty Feminist podcast.
“Bless her,” says Ali with a laugh, thinking back to the time when she would regularly appear on the show with White. “She knew I couldn’t afford my root canal work and she was like, ‘Do you want to make a Christmas card for me and I will pay you exactly how much your root canal costs?’ And I was like, ‘Yes, Deborah, I will do that.’” Ali had just moved to Manchester to live with friends because she could no longer afford to live in London. She was living on tins of beans and contemplating selling her sofa to pay the rent.
Now, at the age of 31, things couldn’t be more different. Having spent so much of her own life shapeshifting, Ali is currently writing Ms Marvel, the upcoming Disney+ show about a metamorphosing teenage superhero from New Jersey – and the first Muslim superhero of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. In the comic the TV series is based on, our heroine Kamala Khan finds herself in possession of superpowers after an incident with the Terrigen Mist, a vapour given off by crystals discovered 25,000 years ago that turns people into monsters or superhumans.
By day, Khan fights normal, teenage obstacles like trying to fit in at school, deal with her homework and please her parents. She is in love with her best friend, but can’t date him. She is in love with the smell of bacon, but her faith won’t allow her to eat it (the comic’s first scene features Khan staring at a BLT, taking in its unholy scent). And then there are the constant microaggressions. “No one is going to, like, honour-kill you?” a schoolmate asks about her friend’s hijab.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, Ali’s own superpowers seem to have materialised out of nowhere, after she jumped on a flight to Los Angeles for her first big writing gig, on Mindy Kaling’s TV reboot of Four Weddings and a Funeral. “I don’t think it would be fair to the people who gave me lots of opportunities to say it came from nowhere,” says Ali, keen to credit the agents who got her over to LA and landed her a seat in the writing room for the Netflix blockbuster Sex Education. “There’s no way I could have known the show was going to be as successful as it was – and at the exact moment I ended up in LA. So that was very useful.”
Despite having no background in screenwriting, Ali got into the writers’ room through her near encyclopaedic research into the industry. She read books about the craft, prepared scripts, and even read a book about CAA, the powerful LA agency she is now with.
Her Four Weddings and Funeral gig was also partly serendipitous: the team wanted someone who could write a character from Hounslow in London, which is her hometown.
Whatever, one thing’s for sure: her days of tinned beans and sofa-selling are behind her. “I have a two-bedroom apartment, which is nice. People say money can’t buy you happiness. I don’t mean this in a romantic way – but it can. In capitalism, you can buy a relative sense of security and a lack of fear about your next months’ rent.” She stops for a moment, then carefully adds: “It is trauma to be in constant fear of not being able to survive. Now I just feel this deep sense of joy. What a gift.”
However, her new gig – writing a highly anticipated live-action series – comes with its downsides. Ali has become a very private person since landing Ms Marvel. She tries to keep many of the details of her life secret, rarely doing press. She has made an exception because I “seemed cool” but I wonder if it’s also due to our similarities. Ali and I are both young, Muslim women from London who struggled to make it in our chosen careers before we moved across the pond. Both of us know the price women of colour can pay for being prominent, for simply existing in a public space.
“Any time I say something to the press,” says Ali, “I know – we both know – what to prep for.” She is trying to brush off a recent comment someone made online, about wishing they could rip her guts out. “I have to weigh up to what extent it is worthwhile, or necessary, or valuable, to do anything even slightly public.”
After Ali was announced as the Ms Marvel showrunner, journalists began pondering aloud how such an inexperienced writer landed such a coveted job. YouTube videos were dedicated toslagging her off.People trawled through her social media. One particular comment, in which Ali said women “can burn shit to the ground” and rebuild it into an “anti-capitalist utopia” caused a mini-storm, as did her tweets about Nigel Farage being doused in a milkshake last year. “[I am] not inter