BOLD MOVE INTO NEW TERRITORY
CHALLENGING DRAMA I MAY DESTROY YOU IS A TOUGH BUT VITAL WATCH, WERUCHE OPIA TELLS GABRIEL TATE
‘ISUSPECT it will provoke quite a lot,’ says Weruche Opia, ‘but that’s partly why I wanted to be a part of this series.’ You can’t blame the 32year-old Bad Education star, especially when the creator and star of the series in question is Chewing Gum’s prodigiously talented Michaela Coel.
I May Destroy You follows Arabella (Coel) and her best friends Terry (Weruche Opia) and Kwame (Paapa Essiedu) as they cope with the aftermath of Arabella’s fractured recollections of sexual assault after her drink was spiked on a night out.
Exploring every imaginable aspect – and challenging every assumption – of consent, the 12-part drama runs the gamut of moods from the euphoria of an MDMA high to the trauma of a sexual assault, and all points in between. It’s likely to present a challenge to a BBC1 audience – and rightly so, thinks Opia.
‘These are conversations that need to be had, especially on a traditionally conservative channel,’ she says. ‘I don’t think anyone’s seen anything like this before – so many issues stressed, so many feelings. It’s time to see more different realities and I hope this is a way for people to address deep-seated things that may have happened to them, to know they’re not alone so they can move on in their lives.’
If it’s challenging to watch, I suggest it must have been doubly so to perform in.
‘It was a very respectful, safe set,’ says Opia. ‘I had a body double for my sex scenes and they made sure a therapist was available to cast and crew. It became like being with a second family, especially with Michaela. I remember auditioning with her and feeling like I’d had the most amazing date of my life. We were fake friends but now we’re real friends!’
Terry, Arabella’s best friend since childhood, is a struggling actor. ‘I could relate to that bit for sure!’ laughs Opia. However, Opia never had much doubt she’d be an actor from the moment she cajoled her siblings into putting on a play of Humpty Dumpty aged five (‘my mum paid us in Smarties’). From then, there were school plays, drama and sociology at university, and then part-time drama school. ‘I thought, let me do what I’m best at,’ she says.
For a long time, that has been comedy, whether it was an episode of Inside No.9 about cleaning contractors, Samson Kayo’s underrated London pizza parlour sitcom Sliced or Bad Education, where she had to don a school uniform to torment Jack Whitehall’s Mr Wickers.
‘That was really bizarre because I was 26 at the time,’ she says. ‘I remember the first time I tried on the uniform and got immediate flashbacks. It was a lot of fun. But drama – hard-hitting, deep drama – is where it’s at for me.
‘I flew in from filming a pilot in Virginia to the first cast read for I May Destroy You last summer. They’re making a series of the Virginia thing now but I May Destroy You was never going to be the wrong decision.’
Co-star: Michaela. . Coel as Arabella.
I May Destroy You starts on Monday at 10.45pm on BBC1