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while writing all night she meets a friend for a drink and ends up on her own and being sexually

assaulted, a trauma that quickly returns to her in flashbacks.

The parallels to Coel’s experiences do not need spelling out, but the drama’s long journey also

explores the theme of consent in other lives, most notably Arabella’s gay friend Kwame (Paapa

Essiedu, an actor Coel befriended at the Guildhall drama school) who is raped on a hook-up.

The show doesn’t pull its punches and it’s not surprising that Coel dedicated her acting Bafta on
Sunday to the show’s intimacy co-ordinator, Ita O’Brien, who sensitively helped to realise

scenes that were powerfully loaded in almost every imaginable way.

Addressing O’Brien on Sunday, she said: “Thank you for your existence in our industry, for

making the space safe, for creating physical, emotional and professional boundaries so that we

can make work about exploitation, loss of respect, about abuse of power without being exploited

or abused in the process.

“I know what it is like to shoot without an intimacy director. The messy, embarrassing feeling

for the crew. The internal devastation for the actor. Your direction was essential to my show and

I believe essential for every production company that wants to make work exploring themes of
consent.”

It was the speech Coel finally got to read out after failing even to be nominated for the Golden
Globes — unlike the saccharine Netflix drama Emily in Paris, which did get a nomination,

causing one of that show’s writers, Deborah Copaken, to express her “rage” over Coel’s “snub”.

As I May Destroy You demonstrates, drawing fictional inspiration from her life is something

Coel is very adept at. Chewing Gum was the semi-autobiographical story of Tracey, a sweet and

naive 24-year-old virgin living with her evangelical Christian family on a Tower Hamlets estate.
Among Tracey’s unforgettable fourth-wall-breaking reflections to camera was this introduction

of her best friend, a weapons-grade motormouth with a good heart: “Candice is like the buffest

girl I’ve ever seen on the whole of my estate, but she’s got learning difficulties so it sort of

balances it out — so, like, I can be best friends with her, and I’m not jealous or anything.”