Page 260 - FINAL_Guildhall Media Highlights 2019-2020 Coverage Book

The 32-year-old Londoner is maintaining her physical and mental health by exercising and
meditating. She runs or cycles daily, using her outdoor excursions to exchange the occasional nod
or smile with strangers. “It’s like a dopamine hit for me.” As for the meditation – “My method is, I
focus on my breath, and sometimes play with my breath. So I’ll take a big, big breath in, then just
release it, and I do that over and over again, so lots of oxygen gets into my brain.”

That lust for life in the teeth of adversity is shot through I May Destroy You. A dark drama studded
with nuggets of hard humour, it centres on Arabella (Coel), a 20-something Londoner whose
sharp, pithy tweets go viral and propel her from social media star to bestselling author of a
memoir titled Chronicles of a Fed-Up Millennial.

She wins a publishing deal for a follow-up book but, struggling to meet her deadline, pulls an all-
nighter. To let off steam, she pops out for drinks with friends. As we see in unflinching detail, the
evening gets big, boozy, druggy and messy, with Arabella ending up back in front of her laptop
with a fuzzy recollection of events. But as the hangover-clouds part, she experiences flashbacks
that indicate that she’s been the victim of a sexual assault.

Michaela Coel (GETTY)
Over two and a half years in the making, I May Destroy You – provocative, witty and beautifully
acted – has a back story as twisted as its plot. Firstly it is, at heart, autobiographical.

Delivering the annual MacTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh International Television Festival in
August 2018, Coel used her speech to reveal the horrific event that happened to her in the midst
of a scriptwriting session for series two of Chewing Gum.

“I was working overnight in the [production] company’s offices; I had an episode due at 7am,” she
told the audience. “I took a break and had a drink with a good friend who was nearby. I emerged
into consciousness typing season two, many hours later. I was lucky. I had a flashback. It turned
out I’d been sexually assaulted by strangers. The first people I called after the police, before my
own family, were the producers.”

Speaking now, she tells me that, at the time she made the speech, she’d already been writing I May
Destroy You for six months. But after the attack happened at the beginning of 2016, she quickly
knew that she’d turn the personal trauma into a creative response.