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“I’ve done scenes before where we’ve had nothing to support us and it’s so stressful,” he admits. “But I
didn’t have any qualms, mainly because of how sensitively it was handled – like we have an intimacy
coordinator at all times. We spent a lot of time in preparation for those scenes.”

The intimacy co-ordinator was Ita O’Brien, who also worked on the BBC adaptation of Sally
Rooney’s Normal People. For all that it is being hyped as a #MeToo drama, Essiedu rejects the idea that I
May Destroy You is “pandering to a zeitgeisty type thing”. Obviously, he says, “it’s a series that confronts
and challenges our current ideas around sex and consent and romance, and our responses to trauma as
well. But a lot of it is inspired by things that have actually happened.” In 2018 Coel spoke out about being
assaulted. “Michaela is jumping from a place of authenticity,” Essiedu continues. “She captures the reality
of lives that I recognise.”

At a time when London has been in lockdown for several weeks, the teeming hang-outs and unguarded
intimacies of those lives seem to belong to a far-off era. Bearded and keen to chat in his south London flat,
where he has been keeping himself in shape with yoga and running, Essiedu says he’s also been having
“insane dreams”.

He was co-starring in a three-hander, Pass Over, at London’s Kiln theatre, when the curtain came down on
live performance. Now, when many young actors are wondering whether they will ever work again, the 29-
year-old is being beamed into the nation’s living rooms from several directions.

His award-winning Hamlet, from 2016, is being streamed on iPlayer by the Royal Shakespeare Company.
He has also been cutting a dash as Alex, smooth-talking son of a gangland boss, in Sky Atlantic’s horribly
compelling Gangs of London. He shakes his head and admits it’s all a bit bewildering. “It’s just a very happy
coincidence that all of them are coming out around the same time.”

I May Destroy You reunites him with a drama-school friend, whom he credits with helping him to get his
first break. As two black students at London’s predominantly white Guildhall School of Music and Drama,
he and Coel would often work together and, for their final showcase, performed a duologue that Coel
knocked up for want of anything that suited them in the college library. “It was set on a basketball court,
which was a bit of a risk since we were performing in a West End theatre,” he says. For all that the ball did
at one point bounce off into the audience of agents and casting directors, it clearly demonstrated his star
quality. Within months he had joined the RSC for a small speaking part in The Merry Wives of Windsor,
and two years later he proved his Shakespearean mettle by stepping up midway through a performance to
play Edmund to Simon Russell Beale’s King Lear, after Sam Troughton, whom he was understudying, lost
his voice.

But it was with his hip-hopping, graffiti-daubing Hamlet – performed when he was just 25 – that he proved
himself a classical actor of the first rank. Reports at the time acclaimed him as the RSC’s first black Hamlet
– which he dismissed as a backhanded compliment, preventing him from being evaluated simply as
Hamlet.

Some pointed out that he too was carrying the burden of having been orphaned young – his father died in
Ghana when he was 14 and his mother, a fashion and design teacher who brought him up alone in the east
London suburb of Walthamstow, succumbed to cancer when he was still at drama school. “That is
something I do carry with me, but you’ve got to remember that at the end of the day it’s still acting,” he says.
He doesn’t belong to the school of method acting. “I wouldn’t be so self-indulgent as to see it as a means of
me digesting my own guilt,” says Essiedu, “but of course everything I do is informed by what has made me
what I am, so there are levels of empathy.”

Whereas I May Destroy You is fiercely contemporary, Gangs of London is rooted in colonial history. The
gang at its centre is an alliance of Irish and African-Caribbean dynasties whose patriarchs – we learn in a
grand funeral set piece – teamed up in defiance of notices proclaiming “No blacks, no Irish”. Both Essiedu’s
Alex and Sean, played by Joe Cole, are grappling with what it means to be sons and heirs, and both notably
speak in RP accents very different from those of their parents. In one quietly revealing scene, Alex’s young
nephew is dropped off at what is clearly a private prep school.

It’s a reflection of a parental ambition that powered Essiedu’s own childhood. When he was seven, his
mother entered him for a scholarship to the private Forest school, a couple of miles from their home, after