Michaela Coel, writer and star of the series I May Destroy You, is causing a stir
The series I May Destroy You holds up a mirror to issues of sexual consent and recovery from trauma… and to its creator, writer and star Michaela Coel, who has brought a revitalising voice to the entertainment industry.
Michaela Coel is a force to be reckoned with.
The 33-year-old has shaken up the entertainment industry as showrunner of the genre-twisting, acutely unsettling series I May Destroy You. But provocative as she is, the British star isn’t interested in shock tactics or strong-arming anyone into picking a side, nor is she soap-boxing. Michaela is simply doing things the way she wants to do them: with determination and empathy.
‘I spent a lot of my life pleading, hoping for empathy,’ she says. ‘It feels only fitting for me to try to do the same thing. I think it crosses very stubborn wirings in our brain.’
This impulse is at the heart of I May Destroy You, in which Michaela plays Arabella, a young writer who is sexually violated after her drink is spiked, and walks a bewildering
path back from trauma to wholeness. The series is based on Michaela’s own experience of sexual assault and its shattering effects, and at times it makes for discomforting TV.
‘I’m not saying anything is wrong or right,’ she told Trevor Noah on The Daily Show. ‘I’m just putting characters in a frame and watching them interact. I want us to see how uncomfortable it is. It’s not so easy to place yourself in a camp – it’s really hard when you can see where both sides are coming from.’
The show, available on Showmax, has been lauded for its nuanced deep dive into issues of sexual consent, the mercurial nature of trauma and racism in modern Britain, sparking conversations in both public and private circles. ‘Could this be the best drama of the year?’ asked The Guardian.
A professor at Washington University deconstructed the show’s processing of sexual assault. The series even made Barack Obama’s list of favourite TV shows in 2020.
Not bad for someone who admits she’d googled, ‘How to write a TV show’. Yet the series and its creator didn’t garner a single Golden Globe nomination, and the outcry over the snub has almost matched the show’s acclamation.
One can only speculate what Michaela thinks about it all. She’s not one for knee-jerk reactions. When HBO asked her to release a statement after George Floyd’s death, she paused, not wanting to promote a show during such a weighty political moment. She wrote a poem for Floyd and his mother instead, after meditating on it. Meditation and qigong are regular practices for Michaela, who at one point was a member of a Pentecostal church, embracing the right-wrong clarity that it offered her. In fact, she dropped out of a political science degree course to devote herself to the Good Word. But she left the church years ago. ‘I’m more okay with uncertainty and mystery,’ she says.
You won’t be hearing much from her on social media either.
‘It was shaping my mind, my idea of myself, how I chose to see the world,’ she says. ‘I don’t know whether social media was responsible for that or whether trauma makes you see things in a very binary way – good-bad, victim-criminal, blackwhite – but I became quite uniform in the way I see the world, a world that is not uniform. I left [social media] while writing I May Destroy You, and the way my brain changed made me view how that affects how we process anything.’
That distinct lack of polarity is evident in the show, which unflinchingly deals with heavy subject matter while infusing it with heart – and even humour.
Michaela recalls the moment her life was cleaved into ‘before the assault’ and ‘after the assault’. ‘We were waiting for the detective, and my friend had been looking after me. As I sat there, I recall feeling confused, like it was the beginning of a life-ending. When I looked over to my friend, he was playing Pokémon Go on his phone. I remember thinking: “What is the word to describe that idea, that experience?”
‘I like to write about things that feel absurd. I think it’s a way to disengage from something traumatic, but also to edge closer to it to understand it.’
❛It’s not so easy to place yourself in a camp – it’s really hard when you can see where both sides are coming from.❜
The series also hooks into the particular experience of being a black woman dealing with sexual assault. ‘I never noticed being a woman,’ Arabella says at one point. ‘I was too busy being poor and black.’ Michaela recalls saying those words while doing a play about gender inequality; the play was a response to the Robin Thicke song ‘Blurred Lines’, widely condemned for its misogynistic lyrics.
‘I couldn’t relate to the frustrations all these people had. They’d often say, “Michaela, what do you think?” And I said one day, “Guys, I’m really sorry. I’m busy being black and poor,”’ she says. ‘Through that play I learnt to process the nuances of being a woman that I hadn’t yet engaged with.’
THE CHILD OF GHANAIAN IMMIGRANTS,
Michaela grew up on a council estate in Tower Hamlets, a working-class neighbourhood in London, with her sister and mom, who was a cleaner at the time. She got into acting through spoken word poetry, performing at clubs and cafés around London, eventually meeting a playwright who encouraged her to take acting classes.
The Guildhall School of Music & Drama proved to be an education in more ways than one. During one class exercise, students whose families owned the house they were living in were asked to go to one end of the room; Michaela was the only one on the other end. ‘My family has rented our whole lives,’ she says. ‘You’re always on fragile ground because [your home] is not yours. It gives you a drive, an ambition, because nothing is certain. That is a resilience no person with stability can replicate. There are blessings to the struggle.’
A few bit parts followed before she was asked to develop her cheeky one-woman play for television. Chewing Gum is a fourth-wallbusting cringe-comedy series about a young woman trying to lose her virginity in a council estate community. But while the show won two BAFTAs and launched her career, it was strewn with production challenges that would inform her future decisions in the business.
During the 2018 Edinburgh International Television Festival’s MacTaggart Lecture, Michaela delivered a speech that’s been likened to ‘throwing a hand grenade into the British television industry’. As the first black woman to present the keynote address in its 42-year history, she took aim through a series of anecdotes and open-ended questions. Among other things, she challenged the production community to re-evaluate its attitude to race and class. About the gift bag for her first big award, she recalled, ‘It contained dry shampoo, tanning lotion and a foundation even Kim Kardashian was too dark for. A reminder: this isn’t your house.’
She also revealed that although she was involved in every aspect of Chewing Gum, a show she conceived, her request to be made an executive producer was roundly rejected.
So by the time it came to pitching I May Destroy You, there was no way Michaela would accept an offer that didn’t suit her. In 2017, she turned down a $1 million Netflix deal upfront. Why? She couldn’t retain any percentage of the copyright. When she asked a Netflix executive if she could retain at least 5% of her rights, the response was, ‘It’s not how we do things here,’ she recalls. Her agency in the US tried to push her to take the deal and, after she learnt they’d be paid an undisclosed amount if she did, she fired them. Michaela remains agentless. That same year she pitched the show to the BBC and got full creative control, production credits and the rights to the work.
The final words of her MacTaggart Lecture set the tone for a career that is rooted in taking on the status quo: ‘Instead of wishing for the good ol’ glory days, about the way life used to be before Mark Zuckerberg graduated, I’m going to try to be my best, to be transparent and to play whatever part I can to help fix this house. What part will you play?’
❛I’m more okay with uncertainty and mystery.❜