Michaela Coel, born Michaela Ewuraba Boakye-Collinson, is a British actress, director, screenwriter, producer, and singer born to Ghanaian parents. She grew up in a public housing complex near London where she and her family were one of few Black families; this isolation continued until Coel reached secondary school, when she found herself surrounded by more people her age from the diaspora, mostly from Ghana and Nigeria.
Coel graduated from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in 2012. Her final project at Guildhall, a play called Chewing Gum Dreams, received critical acclaim and was later adapted into the Channel 4 sitcom Chewing Gum, for which Coel earned two BAFTAs. Despite Chewing Gum’s success, Coel recalls difficulties in its production as she was kept out of much of the creative process. She noticed this phenomenon again when she originally pitched her series I May Destroy You to Netflix and was offered $1 Million upfront but none of the copyright. She declined this offer, and in her keynote address at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, shared that she was discouraged about the British television industry’s seeming unwillingness to extend equitable creative opportunities to underrepresented filmmakers, whom she calls “misfits.”
This year, however, I May Destroy You finally came to the screen. BBC offered Coel full creative control of the series; she wrote, produced, directed, and starred in I May Destroy You, a fictionalized account of Coel’s own sexual assault. The series follows Arabella, a young writer in London, as she navigates her social life, relationships, and career in the wake of a traumatic sexual assault. I May Destroy You has received overwhelming praise, and is a testament to what television can achieve when production studios hand over full creative control to filmmakers like Coel.