Page 258 - Guildhall School Media Highlights Coverage Book - 2019-2020

Radio Times

5 July 2020

Michaela Coel reveals the BBC ‘took the reins off’

for I May Destroy You’s hard-hitting scenes:

“They let me do anything”

Craig McLean meets Michaela Coel and talks about the process of getting I May Destroy You on to
screen.

Michaela Coel zooms into view on my laptop, all sunshine cheerfulness and boundless enthusiasm
with, in the foreground, a bucket-sized beaker of green juice. It pretty much fills the screen.

“It’s almost as if I wanted you to notice it!” is her playful rejoinder when I ask what it is.
Apologising, the actor/writer/director says it was blending this health-giving smoothie that made
her a notch late for our lunchtime interview. “Why did I do this?” she ponders. “Because it’s quick
and I haven’t eaten yet.”

Coel first came to our attention in 2015 as the creator and star of the double-Bafta-winning E4
comedy Chewing Gum; now she’s here to talk about her latest, very different, project, the must-see
BBC One drama I May Destroy You, which she also wrote and stars in.

She is isolating alone in a flat in Shoreditch, east London, at the moment but is weathering the
solitude just fine. “This is a very familiar mode to me. I write long… things, so I go away to the
middle of nowhere and don’t see human beings for weeks on end,” she explains of a routine that
has taken her to writing retreats in Somerset, Cornwall, Zurich, Berlin and Lake Tahoe. “So, I’m OK.
I’ve got my health!”