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“You go through the very normal [process] – as I try to depict in the second episode – almost like
an initiation into victimhood. You’re quickly sent, in the police investigation, into the [sexual
assault] referrals unit, and your swabs are taken.”

She’s keen to stress that the show is not wholly an account of her experiences. “That was the
beginning. But talking to different people, I began to realise that mine was not a rare experience,
and that there were many different kinds of sexual assault, where consent was taken from you and
you were unaware.

“So then many, many stories developed, which enabled me to continue through 12 episodes and
find a way to make it not just be about my personal experience.”

Raised in east London by her Ghanaian mum, Coel started out as a performance poet and won a
scholarship to the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. Post-college, she began landing parts in
National Theatre productions, securing a writing commission from the Royal Court. There were
acting roles on television, too, notably in Top Boy and Black Mirror.

But it’s clearly her own writing, her own projects, that most fire her up. Coel’s one-woman play,
Chewing Gum Dreams, part of her final year’s work at Guildhall, was a fringe theatre hit in 2012
and became the basis for Chewing Gum. The sitcom ran for two series and followed the comic
misadventures of a formerly God- fearing woman desperate to lose her virginity.

The storylines, as hilarious as they were often wincingly mortifying, were inspired by her own
teenage conversion to Pentecostal Christianity. Coel embraced a “militant faith” that compelled her
to stay celibate between the ages of 17 and 22. She was so devout she converted her mother and
sister, too.

It was in January 2016, a few months before her two Chewing Gum Bafta wins (for breakthrough
talent and best female performance in a comedy), that the assault happened. The following year
she began shopping around the idea for a show based on her experience. “I pitched to HBO and
they could see, more than I could, that I wasn’t ready to do the show – it was too soon.”

Having shelved the idea, in 2018 she was shooting Black Earth Rising. The gripping BBC
Two/Netflix thriller about African war crimes, written and directed by Hugo Blick, featured Coel in a
leading role alongside John Goodman and Harriet Walter. In the midst of production, Netflix asked
for more information about her new idea.