SUNDAY, AUGUST 2 , 2020. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ EE E3
Television
BY SONIA RAOMichaela Coel has come to
accept that there is a certain
degree of uncertainty to life.
Whereas the artist once turned to
Christianity as a means of seeking
stability, she has recently gotten
into qigong. When you choose to
leave religion, Coel says, you can
lose your grip on reality. Practic-
ing qigong focuses her mind on
deep breathing and gentle body
movements. She centers herself
from within.
From her home in London,
Coel speaks with the clarity of
someone who has worked
through these mental processes
time and time again. She credits
some of it to Yuval Noah Harari’s
“Homo Deus,” a book she read
examining the individual human
experience. Soon after joining a
video call with The Washington
Post, she also mentions how
grateful she is to have gone to
therapy in the immediate after-
math of being sexually assaulted
four years ago, while in the midst
of writing her BAFTA-winning
television series “Chewing Gum.”
Coel publicly addressed the as-
sault at the Edinburgh Interna-
tional Television Festival in Au-
gust 2018, where she delivered a
keynote address with the same
unassuming confidence she ema-
nates today. She had started writ-
ing a fictionalized version of her
experience that spring, escaping
to the mountains to sort through
her emotions on paper. After trav-
eling back and forth for edits
from her script editor and fellow
executive producers, Coel wound
up with a dozen episodes of “I
May Destroy You,” now on HBO.
“I don’t think there was ever a
moment where I said, I am now
ready to make the show,” Coel
says. “That point never came. Life
is a process, isn’t it? There wasn’t
a moment where I felt like I had
reached the pinnacle of recovery
to make a show. I make art, and I
write, to help myself.”
Inspired by a one-woman play
Coel wrote in college, “Chewing
Gum” centers on a 24-year-old
shop assistant named Tracey Gor-
don as she aims to explore life
beyond her Christian fundamen-
talist upbringing by, above all
else, losing her virginity. Tracey is
as hilarious as she is naive, rein-
forced by the commentary she
delivers looking straight into the
camera. The cheeky series attract-
ed immediate praise upon debut-
ing in 2015 on the British channel
E4, and heaps more after making
the leap to Netflix.
“Chewing Gum” is indisput-
ably Coel’s brainchild, set in a
part of London similar to where
she grew up. The show earned her
multiple BAFTA awards, one for
her lead performance and anoth-
er for her “breakthrough” writ-
ing. But the opportunity to adapt
the play for television came, at
times, at the expense of Coel’s
creative ownership. In the Edin-
burgh lecture, she recalled fight-
ing for her right to craft the series
without any co-writers: “Is it im-
portant that the voices used to
interruption get the experience of
writing something without inter-
ference, at least once?” she won-
dered aloud.
On both seasons, Coel, the se-
ries creator, was denied an execu-
tive producer credit.
Looking back, she tries to focus
not on what she wishes “Chewing
Gum” had been, but on what it did
for her. The series’ success boost-
ed her star, and its painful mo-
ments taught her what to avoid.
Coel went on to write all 12
episodes of “I May Destroy You” —
on which she is an executive
producer — and co-directed nine
of them. The show contains clear
parallels to her own life; like her
protagonist, writer Arabella Es-
siedu, Coel had taken a break
from working overnight to meet a
deadline when she was drugged
and assaulted.
“I really enjoyed ‘Chewing
Gum.’ I loved it. When we fin-
ished, I wept like a baby,” she says.
“But for me, when we create
television, we’re making a story,
and we serve that story first and
foremost. Nothing comes beforethe tale that we tell. So I under-
stand that, in order to tell the
story, I have to be strong.”
For Coel, believing in her cre-
ative worth required her to find
the strength to turn down $1 mil-
lion. She made headlines earlier
this month after telling Vulture
that she stepped away from a
lucrative Netflix deal while pitch-
ing “I May Destroy You” because
the company refused to grant her
any percentage of the rights. She
clarifies that this wasn’t an imme-
diate reaction. She had already
celebrated with friends and en-
listed a lawyer to draw up con-
tracts when she took a moment to
reevaluate.
Ultimately, it was Coel’s pur-
suit of calm, of that stability, that
stopped her from following
through. She had just wrapped
her role as a legal investigator on
Hugo Blick’s series “Black Earth
Rising,” and the character’s per-
sistent curiosity rubbed off on
her. A discomfort with the lack of
transparency surrounding the
Netflix deal rattled around in
Coel’s brain. She began to ask
questions they couldn’t seem to
answer.
“If there’s a little voice in your
head, you should investigate it,”
she says. “It led me to the BBC and
HBO, and I’ve had a really good
time. I think I gained a belief in
myself because they believed in
me and they trusted me. It reallytook a long time for me to adjust
to being trusted.”
Coel describes “I May Destroy
You” as a series about consent,
but not in the legal sense.
“That didn’t interest me at all,
and I think it’s because I am
aware that cases very rarely end
in justice,” she says. “The victim,
or the survivor, is left open....
How do they find their own clo-
sure? What is that difficult jour-
ney, when they lose their sense of
awareness and perception of
themselves in the world?”
While Arabella’s assault is cen-
tral to the story, her two best
friends, Terry (Weruche Opia)
and Kwame (Paapa Essiedu),
grapple with nonconsensual en-
counters as well. Coel approached
the series as a way to work
through trauma, setting out with
little intention other than to ex-
plore how the characters manage
to “navigate their lives with the
issues of consent and sexual as-
sault plaguing them.”
The tables turn later on in the
season, when Arabella comes to
suspect one of her friends of
wrongdoing. She shuts down, un-
able to stray from a binary per-
spective. Everything becomes
flattened and polarized, Coel
says. Arabella has erased the idea
that, as humans, our actions can
be fluid.
Coel made drastic rewrites to
that episode until she no longercould. At the beginning, she says,
it seemed enough for Arabella to
recognize that her friend could do
both good and bad things, that
someone she loves could be both a
hero and a villain. “Then,” Coel
continues, “I thought, no, love, it’s
too easy. Arabella has to see that
it’s her who has that capacity. We
have to see it in Arabella to
actually get it.”
In trying to better understand
herself, Coel strives to empathize
more with those around her. She
credits much of what she knows
about being a showrunner to
Blick, whom she observed on
“Black Earth Rising.” Six months
into that shoot, she says, she
never witnessed him shouting or
seeming stressed. Even on “Chew-
ing Gum,” her primary concern
was to serve the story, and to
maintain calm on set so she could
present herself as someone others
could approach if they had con-
cerns about that effort.
“Some people, it’s hard for
them to share, so you have to try
to pay attention and spot it when
someone is a little bit uncomfort-
able,” Coel adds. “However, I also
do understand that no shoot is
ever perfect. All you can do is try.
Try to have empathy every day.
And that’s what I would do.”
Nowadays, Coel surrounds
herself with people who would
treat her similarly. She left her
representatives at Creative Art-
ists Agency after they pushed for
her to take the Netflix deal, which
she discovered would have
earned them back-end money.
Those weren’t the first agents she
has ditched, either. Asked what
she looks for in a team, Coel
responds, “Ethics, ethics, ethics.”
Financial growth isn’t a bad goal
to have, she says, but it isn’t hers
at all: “If you are into storytelling
and ethics and always trying to be
mindful about how we navigate
our industry, and our morals and
what kind of people we want to
be, that’s what I like.”
Working with HBO and the
BBC, Coel retained a sense of
control over her creative process.
The early drafts of “I May Destroy
You” streamed out of her con-
sciousness; the right sentiments
were there, she says, if a bit
clouded. Given the baggage she
carried from her past work in
television, she was almost star-
tled by the producers’ delicate
approach to feedback. They
didn’t dictate to her, instead only
pointing to what they didn’t un-
derstand. She’d head back to the
mountains, regroup and return
with something clearer.
Finally, Coel didn’t have to
fight to be heard.
“And it gave me confidence,”
she says. “It gave me a lot of
confidence.”
[email protected]With ‘I May Destroy You,’ Michaela Coel takes control
Three years after ‘Chewing Gum,’ the star returns with an HBO show loosely based on her life
L AURA RADFORD/HBONATALIE SEERY/HBOBAFTA award-
winner Michaela
Coel plays a writer
and sexual assault
survivor in the 12-
episode series “I May
Destroy You.”“If there’s a little
voice in your
head, you
should
investigate it. It
led me to the
BBC and HBO,
and I’ve had
a really
good time.”
Michaela Coel,
on declining a
$1 million deal