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They also speak with clarity and force about topics most others find difficult to articulate. They deal head-on with the murkiness of sexual communication and consent, issues of race and racism, processing and living with trauma, and the risks and rewards of vulnerability. Both Harris and Coel have written brilliant, frank, confrontational work with no clear-cut heroes or villains. Harris, whose plays Daddy and Slave Play have awed and confounded Broadway audiences. In the spirit of The New Originals Issue, we invited Coel to have a conversation with the playwright, actor, and screenwriter Jeremy O. Harkin is, quite simply, “brilliant,” Coel says. Thanks to Harkin’s guidance, Coel’s supporting cast came together with a singular electric chemistry onscreen, and a careful, caring approach to the material behind the scenes. Coel credits casting director Julie Harkin (whose previous work on the British show Utopia she found particularly inspiring) for her ability to envision certain actors for roles she never would have imagined them in-even when it came to one of her oldest friends from drama school. This approach also meant she got to assemble her ideal team of costars and collaborators, with whom she is photographed here.

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Her deal with the BBC gave her full control and full rights to the work she also wrote, directed, and executive-produced every episode in the series. Instead of accepting anything close to business as usual, she demanded transparency, and got it. While she was pitching what would become I May Destroy You, Coel declined any deal that didn’t give her full creative control over the project (including, most notably, a $1 million offer from Netflix). “I’m going to try to be my best, to be transparent, and to play whatever part I can to help fix this ,” she concluded. She spoke clearly and deliberately about how she learned to stop saying, “Yes, of course, holy shit, yes,” to those in power and started understanding the necessity of saying no. Coel also used the speech as an opportunity to hold the television industry accountable for all the ways in which she felt mistreated and disenfranchised during the production of Chewing Gum.

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During a lecture at the 2018 Edinburgh International Television Festival, Coel spoke about the incident publicly for the first time, using the rest of her 53 minutes onstage to address her experiences with racism as the child of Ghanaian immigrants in London, in a mostly white drama school, and as a young actress and TV writer.

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In an interview with Coel over the summer, Trevor Noah suggested it was, in fact, “a show about everything,” which she didn’t refute.Īrabella’s story is a fictionalized version of Coel’s own assault, which occured while she was writing an episode for the second season of Chewing Gum, a comedy series based on a one-woman show she wrote in her last year of drama school. The show has been compared to Girls and Fleabag (and Coel’s unapologetic writing and acting style to that of both shows’ creators), but what sets I May Destroy You apart is Coel’s unique ability to distill what could have been an unbearable treatise on the nature of trauma into a sharp, funny, complex, deeply personal show about the nature of existence.

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In 12 episodes, Coel spins a complex tale about a young writer in London named Arabella who is sexually assaulted after her drink is spiked at a bar, and then spends months trying to piece together the events of the night, process the trauma, and hold her rapist accountable-all while blowing past multiple professional deadlines and navigating the complexities of her relationships with her friends, family, lovers both ex- and current, and a growing base of online fans. Since the June debut of I May Destroy You, the powerful television show Michaela Coel created and stars in, the British writer, poet, and actress has connected with audiences in a once-in-a-generation kind of way.