Michaela Coel full cover feature
We spoke to BAFTA-winning actor Michaela Coel, the creator of Channel 4’s hit sitcom Chewing Gum about the realities of creating your own show, and standing up for creatives of colour. This feature was originally published in Roundtable Journal’s latest issue.
Michaela Coel has experienced an unparalleled amount of success as an actress and writer in a short amount of time. Although, she doesn’t seem too concerned about that. She’ll readily starve for the freedom to create art on her own terms, and she’s fighting at the vanguard to make British television more inclusive for those behind her.
“Life for me is not a hymen,” Michaela Coel captioned an Instagram post earlier this year. In the post, Michaela shared that she is constantly swarmed with questions from aspiring artists on how to ‘break into’ the TV and film industry. However, the idea of penetrating the industry (much like one would a hymen) was never really one Michaela gave much thought. Even when she was sleeping in her Fiat Punto, or earning her salary by cleaning a food court, she already believed that she’d made it. Those formative and, quite frankly, trying experiences long preceded the success of her critically acclaimed sitcom, Chewing Gum, which she starred in and wrote. For that feat, Michaela won the prestigious accolades of ‘Best Female Performance in a Comedy Programme’ and ‘Breakthrough Talent’ at the 2016 British Academy of Film and Television Arts Awards. With her roles in the upcoming BBC/Netflix’s political thriller Black Earth Rising, and the imminent release of the musical Been So Long, one would think those ‘struggle’ days are a distant memory for her. However, Michaela isn’t one to revel in her success alone; throughout her career, she has made it her duty to empower as many creatives as possible. In that same Instagram post from earlier this year, Michaela showcased Liamara Caesar, a Kenyan woman who, at 21, created a manufacturing platform (like Alibaba) for African fashion designers. She commended Liamara for contributing to “socio-economic reformation in the black community”, and it’s clear, even from the second I meet her, that community is Michaela’s heartbeat.
On a clarion Thursday morning, Michaela arrives at the studio in East London in nothing but gym shorts and a black tank top. She beams as she greets everyone on set with geniality, her pink sparkly nails glimmering in the sunlight. “I had them done by a 10 year old,” she tells the nail artist with a cheeky smile. The entire shoot is punctuated by Michaela’s laughter and her playful, quick-witted sense of humour. She engages in banter with the stylist and photographer – leaving the entire room in stitches – whilst flitting seamlessly between outfit changes and striking poses. As tunes by Janelle Monáe, SZA and Nao blare from the speakers, a spark of recognition lights up her face with the start of certain songs. She can’t help but sing along and dance when the camera isn’t flashing. Her excitement over each outfit is bolstered by her vivaciousness, and at one point, she even throws off her shirt with no reservations towards shooting topless.
Later, Bernicia Boateng – the makeup artist for the shoot – tells me that Michaela championed her at the very beginning of her career. Wherever Michaela went, she’d wholeheartedly endorse Bernicia’s services, and now, thanks in part to Michaela’s recommendations, Bernicia has opened her own studio. “If she believes in what you’re doing, she’ll support you all the way,” Bernicia proclaims with both admiration and conviction. When I preface my conversation with Michaela with Bernicia’s praise, she simply responds, “I can’t imagine a version of this [shoot] where I’m not present,” she continues with a shrug, “I just love people.” She tells me that she’s heartened to have worked with women of colour on this particular shoot, and indeed, it was awe-inspiring to see black girl magic in action on set. Michaela’s criteria for collaborating with others isn’t based on their CV but on their talent. She recalls, “I hadn’t even written a scene for TV but I was given a chance [with Chewing Gum].” Of course, Michaela cares about art, but she also understands that the best and only way to preserve the life of all creative industries is to embrace new talent. “We have to dare to bring people in. The pie is bigger when you share it,” she professes.
Growing up on a council estate in East London with her mother and sister, Michaela didn’t take a conventional path to becoming an award-winning actress, writer and producer. “I’d write and [people] liked my poems from when I was about 10,” she recalls, but she never contemplated taking her creativity any further. Schools in Tower Hamlets, the area where she grew up, weren’t capable of encouraging students to pursue the arts. “In ‘bad’ schools, like the one I went to, no one is telling you that you can be anything like that – a writer? No.” It took becoming a devout follower of Pentecostalism to open her eyes to the possibility of writing and spoken word poetry (many of her performances can still be found on YouTube). With a hint of incredulity, she asks, “How can it be religion that taught me what my job could be and not my education?” Michaela’s quest to create took on another life when she dropped out of university to attend the prestigious Guildhall School of Music and Drama, although she renounced her Pentecostal faith along the way. Being the first black woman to enroll in five years, she wasn’t reflected in a lot of the plays they performed and often felt isolated. For her graduating monologue, she wrote her own play called Chewing Gum Dreams, which was initially produced at the Yard Theatre before transferring to four more theatres including The National Theatre. The play (which went on to become Channel 4’s hit sitcom Chewing Gum) was set on a council estate and followed the life of Tracy, a naive yet opinionated young woman, whose blossoming sexuality is at odds with her faith and intrudes upon her interactions with her vibrant working class community.
Earlier this year, Michaela recorded herself on Twitter throwing away her extensive wig collection. Each thump of a hairpiece landing in the bin was a gut punch for every wig aficionado watching. When I remind Michaela of this, with some resignation, she says, “My mum first relaxed my hair when I was four years old, so I always had straight hair. Being in a country where [black people] are 3% of the population, you’re surrounded by the ideal of what you’re ‘supposed’ to look like.” After a slight pause, she leans in and whispers, with wide-eyed zeal: “You can do whatever the fuck you want, but if there’s something you can’t step out of the house without, isn’t that like an addiction? It’s important to interrogate why you do the things you do. Doing that might take us to an uncomfortable place but from that place, we grow.” It’s simple. It’s been said before. But having it reiterated by Michaela so frankly is enough to prompt me to re-evaluate my own tumultuous relationship with my hair. She continues, “My anxiety was that I wouldn’t be loved by a guy without those things,” but ridding herself of the constraints of wigs has given her a new sense of emancipation. “I’m letting everyone know that I’m doing me, and if people decide they want to do them too, great! Find out who you are, what you want, and why you want the things you think you want.”
In so publicly divulging the battles that many black women experience, does she ever feel the pressure to be a role model? With a firm shake of her head, she points out, “I always do what I wanna do, and if I’m a role model for it, I can deal with that. But if I’m a role model because I don’t [do stuff like] smoke,” which she does, “then that doesn’t work. Sometimes I’ll go out of my way to take a picture smoking a cigarette because I don’t want people to think that I’m perfect.” It’s clear that Michaela will never compromise who she is simply because, “That’s not being free, and I believe in informed freedom,” that is, the ability to interrogate your own behaviour. Quoting Mark Manson’s book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, she adds, “Certainty is the enemy of growth.” Asking questions means relinquishing your certainty on a matter, and not knowing the answer to something is, for her, “a scary but ultimately powerful thing.”
Michaela’s desire for freedom is woven into her upcoming onscreen projects. Despite the first episode of Chewing Gum airing only three years ago, she’s already garnered a varied body of work under her belt, and judging from the recent projects she’s been a part of, it’s clear that her work will only become more diverse in the future. Yet, refreshingly, she picks her projects solely on the basis that they are stories she believes need to be told. She says matter-of-factly, “I’ve never been one to do a job because I need the money, I’d rather starve.” And she won’t choose a project for the notoriety either, “I don’t ever want to get to a point where I can’t leave my house without security. If I’m gonna take a project and lose a bit of my privacy, it has to be worth the exchange. For example, Chewing Gum is definitely worth the exchange because that’s my baby, that’s so much of me. My outpouring there is so worth it. Black Earth Rising is also worth it. I read the script and, immediately, I was like, ‘I have to get this job!’”
Michaela views the history of television as a gallery she wants to add to. In the case of Been So Long, “A black woman with a shaved head in a musical playing a love interest to a black man? I want to do that because if I don’t, what if [the story] never gets told?” She has a point. There aren’t many dark-skinned, kinky-haired female protagonists being shown on British TV or in mainstream theatre – even with the natural hair movement in full swing and ‘diversity’ being a hot topic in the media. “I wasn’t always like this,” she points out with searing honesty, “It’s something that came along with [the creation of] Chewing Gum and doing what I want, and realising that it’s more important than money. I’m cool to not be working.”
Been So Long, the film set to be released later this year, began its life as a 1998 play which was then reinvented as a musical premiering at the Young Vic in 2009. Michaela was an instant fan and ended up seeing it five times on stage. She had no inkling that almost a decade on, she’d be taking on the role of the emotionally scarred, dedicated single mother, Simone. When I ask her what it was like to portray Simone on screen, she reveals, “I tried to approach [the film] as a separate entity. There were so many different obstacles I had to face like singing and dancing.” She was considered for the role partly because of old youtube videos of her singing, but knowing that filled her with anxiety at first. “I’ve smoked a lot of cigarettes since then!” She was, however, assured that this wouldn’t be a hindrance to her performance. “My voice is really husky but actually it’s part of the brokenness of the character, you know. She’s had a very hard life so it might show in her voice. It was a new experience – singing for camera? Wooooah!”
It’s worth noting that at Guildhall, the drama school Michaela attended, singing is mandatory. But that didn’t necessarily aid her in preparing for her role in Been So Long. Michaela, cringing ever so slightly, shares that, “Every singing lesson I went to [at drama school], I left crying. I couldn’t actually sing the way other people could sing, and that was hard because I was singing on albums before I got there. Then, suddenly, I was in this space where [people thought] I couldn’t sing, where I needed to aim towards sounding like the people in West End musicals with range and clarity. I spent those three years – a bit like with the wigs – feeling like I should aspire towards something that isn’t necessarily me. So yeah, I came to the musical with a lot of baggage,” I suggest that this couldn’t have been the only trauma she faced at drama school, especially being the first black woman to enroll at Guildhall in a few years. “Absolutely,” she confirms, “I feel like the things we learn as black women, black people in spaces like that, are not the things they intend for us to learn. I’m from a very working class, black background. I hadn’t hung around non-black [people] before going to drama school, or with people from places I’d never heard of. I had to learn how to let down my guard. It’s hard but the thing is, I feel like it prepares you for the industry in a very painful, real way that isn’t intended.” She experienced what is was like to “feel like an alien,” which only became more exasperated under the intensity of the programme. “It can be a very cruel place,” Michaela expands, “Acting is so fluid and subjective that, actually then, talent becomes subjective… It’s hard to measure.” As a result, it’s easy to ‘slip through cracks’ as she puts it, especially as one of the few minorities in such an environment.
This resonates with British rapper Kojey Radical’s short film, Water, which explores identity and experiences of blackness. Michaela provides a haunting voice-over for the film and in it, she muses, “I watched my peers walk a path far different to mine and grew more confident with my own solitude.” In the film, she also reflects on the fact that having darker pigmentation means being expected to bear injustice with a smile. As she and I continue to talk about her experiences at drama school, she reveals, “I had never really felt that before, so that was very useful – thanks Guildhall!” Just as Kojey Radical’s short film clings to hope and resilience even in the face of oppression, Michaela refuses to harbour any bitterness or resentment. When I quote Beyoncé’s well-known proverb to her (“Always stay gracious, best revenge is your paper”), there’s a knowing glint in her eyes as she sagely corrects me: “The best revenge is your happiness.”
For Michaela, “Problems and struggles are good things if we see them as things we can push through, rather than just things to feel the weight of.” She’s often alluded to using comedy as a vehicle to explore darkness. “Everything dark can be made funny. In fact, with most of the things I write, there’s a very dark underbelly that people will or won’t see. There are some people that watch Chewing Gum and think it’s hilarious, which it is, but there are others that think it’s hilarious and find themselves crying at the same time.”
In contrast to Chewing Gum, Hugo Blick’s Black Earth Rising – which explores the ramifications of the Rwandan genocide – will show a much grittier edge to Michaela’s acting. Her character, Kate Ashby, is a survivor of the genocide who has been adopted at a young age and raised in England. She is eventually swept up in an all consuming, international war crime prosecution that forces her to confront her identity. Revisiting her initial shock at the subject matter, Michaela remarks, “You know, I was very young when the genocide happened and I wasn’t taught anything about it in school.” For all its reverberations, Michaela couldn’t help but wonder why the genocide was never brought up throughout her education; she found out about it whilst reading the script for Black Earth Rising. “I was like, ‘wait, what happened? What the fuck?’ And I knew that [by taking this role], I would at least be able to learn about history from different perspectives.” The show doesn’t depict the genocide through a simplified approach of victims and perpetrators; it lays bare the experiences of the tragedy through the various lenses of countless individuals involved.
As well as the theme of crisis in Black Earth Rising, there’s the recurring question of how one group of people can dictate, interrogate, and ultimately judge the actions of another group of people. In an opening scene, a black student at a lecture interrogates a white prosecutor about what gives her the authority to enforce justice on issues within Africa that have stemmed directly from destructive western influences. The student ultimately labels the prosecutor's endeavours as neo-colonialist and his claim hovers throughout the show like a dark cloud in the distance. This question extends beyond the story to the nature of the show, given that it’s written by someone who is detached from the Rwandan genocide. When weighing up how this is navigated, Michaela states that Hugo Blick’s writing is “very nuanced... it feels very considered.” She reminds us that there’s no clear cut solution to this conundrum, “What I like is that [Hugo] doesn’t give one perspective. It’s…,” at this point she takes a lengthy pause to ruminate on her next words, “It’s so tangled.” Is she proposing then, that through the show, Hugo Blick is providing an argument but not the definitive argument regarding the genocide? “Not really. When I think about my own writing, I’m kind of just presenting something for people to consider. It’s not an argument, it’s a musing, almost like a ‘for your consideration’, like a letter, and it feels kind of distant.” She urges viewers not to draw any conclusions, just as the writing of the show avoids doing so: “The problem is, when you feel like you know the answer, that’s when things go wrong.” Like she mentioned earlier in our discussion, certainty is the enemy of growth.
On preparing for the tempestuous role of Kate, she shares, “I read a lot about memory, about depression, about Congo and Rwanda and it moved me, you know. It moved me so much that, I dunno, it was very visceral.” So does she struggle to put down the writer’s hat when she’s solely acting? “Not when you’re doing scripts like this – it’s really easy! The writing was so good that I could just be an actor. Hugo is someone that I’ve known about since before this show – I really do believe in his writing. It’s not always easy for me to relinquish control like that and just play a character. But I felt like, with this project, he was really leading me: he wrote the thing, directed the thing, executive produced the thing. I could just relax and sink into the character.”
In her BAFTA awards acceptance speech, Michaela called for minorities to get behind the screen and write stories that reflect them. But there are still many barriers that people of colour face within the British film and TV industry. For Michaela, this disparity needs to be preemptively combated by letting young people from disadvantaged backgrounds know that pursuing the arts is a legitimate avenue they can explore. As a young girl, she herself was never encouraged to nurture and stretch the parameters of her creative potential. She shares, near exasperation, “It was never an option [for me] to be creative, especially as a child of African immigrants. Encouraging children and young people to express themselves, and to push themselves creatively, not just for their school syllabus, will do miles. We aren’t being told that, and that’s not just black people but working class people too.” For the few minorities that have managed to successfully step into creative careers, Michaela points out that they aren’t given much room to make mistakes: “You feel like you only have one shot, and the amount of pressure that comes with that means you may be too scared to create something. You’re very aware that you might not have a second chance. Failing is healthy but sadly we don’t have that option.”
Before our interview, Michaela asked to share a snippet she had just read from Act Accordingly, a philosophical book by Colin Wright. She read out to me, as if to preface our conversation, “Our shared humanity is something we all have in common.” Much of the beauty of our conversation is that Michaela really is able to connect with people on a human level. In the time we speak, we laugh at each other’s zany anecdotes from drama school as two black women who had to survive in those spaces; we swap book recommendations and compare the microaggressions we’ve endured. Despite the tight schedule, we continue to talk well past our allocated time (thanks to Michaela’s publicist who, judging from how animated we become, lets the conversation run its natural course.) We even foray into the subject of ‘white tears’ after I tell her of the great lengths I’ve been through to hide my own tears in numerous situations. She empathises deeply and points out to me that, unlike our white counterparts, black women don’t have the luxury of weaponising their tears; instead, we must adhere to the rhetoric of ‘strength’ that has been thrust upon us.
In that same Instagram post from March, Michaela declared, “I’ve been sweating for 12yrs and I’ll be breaking and making it till I die.” For her, any success she’s experienced is a byproduct of her unrelenting pursuit to simply create stories that reflect her and those around her. She compliments this with the fact that, in her crusade for artistic freedom, she clearly plans on bringing along as many burgeoning artists as possible. “I would love a writers’ room that is full of black people. That’s my dream – a room full of black women writing a show together. We can be unashamedly honest and talk about things that we know might make other people feel awkward. Right now, I don’t think we have enough room to do that. People need to constantly think about sharing and giving opportunities and resources. If you’re in this industry, and you’re fortunate enough to be benefitting from this industry, you have to ask yourself, ‘Where can I make room for other people?’ It takes work but you have to.” As she says this, the same passion from her interactions during the shoot ignites in her eyes. It’s impossible to speak to Michaela and not be warmed by the fire rumbling in her belly. After our conversation, I leave the studio without a single doubt in my mind that Michaela will go on to create that writers’ room full of unapologetically black women. It’s only a matter of time.
Words by Yolanda Sithole
Styling by Simone Konu Rae
Makeup by Bernicia Boateng
Photography by Laura McCluskey
Head here to purchase a copy of Issue 03 which features work created by over 30 womxn creatives.