In a series of videos uploaded to Twitter in late June, Michaela Coel sits in her bedroom amid a sea of wigs, hair creams, wig stands and preening products. She picks them up, wig after wig, bottle after bottle, and throws them with force into a black bin liner. She is done with spending hours perfectly positioning her hair, Coel tells the camera – not just the straight hair, but the curly “mixed race” hair, too, and any notion that she should look, act, think a certain way to be attractive.
When we meet a couple of weeks later, Coel tells me that act of rebellion against Eurocentric beauty standards feels final. Before, she would switch between wigs and a buzz cut, depending on her mood. Today her hair is shaved down to a No 2, and on the set of the gal-dem-Guardian cover shoot, she’s wondering aloud whether she needs to go shorter. The makeup artist and stylist are not sure, but when Coel sees my hair (a 0.5) she decides to go for it. She whips a pair of clippers from her bag as I offer to shave her head. This is therapy for black women, she later jokes.
As I shave her, I can tell that she’s feeling more herself. With the bone structure of a woman who was born to be bald, Coel tells me, “It’s so liberating – everyone has to do whatever they want in their lives.” She’s not throwing in the towel with all beauty products just yet, though; losing the wigs “also gives me more time to do my makeup. I’m still about it, you know?” Cardi B’s Invasion Of Privacy is playing in the studio and Coel moves in front of the camera, smizing effortlessly and mouthing every word to I Do.
Michaela Coel, 30, came to fame in 2015, when her creation Tracey Gordon made her first appearance on E4’s Chewing Gum. The comedy drama was bold and brash, but more importantly, it resonated with a generation of black women and girls who did not see themselves on screen. Tracey (written and played by Coel) is a childlike, highly religious twentysomething who embarks on a journey of self-discovery and sexual awakening, and who was partly inspired by Coel’s 14-year-old self. In the first episode, Tracey’s best friend, Candice, gives her a less than flattering Beyoncé makeover (think blue contact lenses, blond wigs, a push-up bra, luminescent pink lipstick), in a tragically funny bid to lure her gay, evangelical boyfriend into bed. “She’s a child,” Coel says now. “But then she’s not, obviously, because I can’t play a 14-year-old. She becomes very stunted in her adolescence. Maybe her naivety is something that I had even at the time of writing it. I’m still acting kiddish, which I don’t want to lose.”
Chewing Gum went through 41 drafts before it reached TV screens, and had two previous incarnations. The first was as a 20-minute one-woman play during Coel’s last year at Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. Coel had taken herself out of the big end-of-year show, where the dresses and the characters didn’t quite fit, and Chewing Gum Dreams was born. “I was trying to be someone else and actually failing,” Coel says. “I could feel, ‘This isn’t good. I can do better than this.’ So I thought, ‘Let me, for once, tell my story.’ I started writing memories from secondary school and found I could formulate a story from that.” Inspired by her (unhappy) time at an all-girls Catholic school in London, she was then asked to write an extended, hour-long version (again playing all 11 characters) for the Yard theatre in east London. Coel canvassed her potential audience on the streets, offering free milkshakes in exchange for tickets: “‘If you buy this, meet me in Tinseltown and I’ll give you a milkshake.’ It was literally: roll your sleeves up – if you don’t do this, it won’t get done.”
Chewing Gum got its third and final incarnation on TV after it was commissioned by Channel 4’s chief creative officer, Jay Hunt, the sort of “risk” Coel wishes the industry would take more often. Since then she has won two Baftas (for best female comedian, and breakthrough talent), had a second series commissioned (there are rumours of a third, which she won’t confirm), and appeared in Star Wars: The Last Jedi as well as what was arguably the best episode of Black Mirror, USS Callister (Coel played an employee at a games company who ends up trapped in a special edition). In the US, Chewing Gum received rapturous reviews and Coel was nominated for several Black Reel awards; later this month she will give the keynote MacTaggart lecture at the Edinburgh television festival, becoming the youngest person to do so.
The multifaceted lives of black people, especially black women, are something we rarely see on television. Scrolling through old YouTube videos of Coel, I find one of her performing a poem to an audience in 2009, a parody of the roles that the mainstream media carves out. There’s the character who gets killed at the beginning of every American thriller; the Channel U video girl; and the black nurse in Holby City who gets two minutes of airtime. “I’ve been trying to get on an episode of The Bill since I was 13,” she says, “and as I watch the youths in my place, I sit and wail and vent, because I know I could have played Going To Jail better than any of you.” Here and elsewhere, Coel stresses the importance of having people of color authoring the narratives, rather than simply turning up as talent.
There was a moment in the development of Chewing Gum, somewhere between the first and 41st drafts, she says, where a co-writer was almost brought in, and she cried. “I cried and I wasn’t sure why I cried, and I had to go around interviewing and picking a list of writers. Then, for some reason, Phil Clarke, the Channel 4 head of comedy, got a hold of my script and it was almost like he blew a whistle. Like, ‘Stop – she doesn’t need co-writers.’ I mean, the luck of the whole thing!” she says, grinning. Having space and freedom to tell your story is akin to therapy, Coel says. “Even unintentionally, someone with the best intentions cannot help their gaze. It’s very crucial. I’m very determined to bring more black women, women of color, more working-class women into the writing room.”
Coel grew up on an estate in Tower Hamlets, east London, with her mother and sister, surrounded by the cultures and characters who influenced Chewing Gum. She recalls how, after entering the world of performing arts, she would often find herself in rooms where she was the only person who looked like her and start “sweating from every pore in my body. I think it’s that insecurity of being from a very working-class background, that anxiety: ‘I shouldn’t be here.’” She had grown up watching American shows, where the protagonists were people of color, rather than British ones. “I was watching Moesha, Kenan And Kel, Girlfriends. But I also watched Seinfeld a lot.” Coel didn’t think to work in media was a possibility for her, and if she could change one thing now, it would be raising awareness that jobs like hers are possible for marginalized voices. “People don’t know these jobs exist – especially when you go to schools like mine. These are not options. Being a writer is not a thing. But I would plant that seed in the head of every child, especially working-class children, women of color, men of color, the queer community.”
Next month she will star in Hugo Blick’s Black Earth Rising, a co-production between Netflix and the BBC, set in Rwanda. Coel plays legal investigator Kate Ashby, who takes on a case working alongside her white mother, a lawyer who adopted her in the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide. The series works through layer upon layer of identity politics, as secrets about Ashby and her mother’s past are revealed.
How did someone best known as a “funny woman” step into the role of a woman whose life is so vastly different from her own? “You know, when I think about every job I’ve done, there’s something that doesn’t alienate me, no matter what the character is. There’s this being western and being black at the same time, and having to be very strong – that goes through every job I’ve done. Survival, survival, survival. And I wonder whether that’s a woman thing or a trauma thing. Whether that’s something that everybody has.” Stepping into the role was easier than the accents, “which was something where I was like, ‘Damn.’”
Also, she says, it was a relief not to be in charge. On the set of Chewing Gum, Coel is the boss: it’s her machine, and as such she flits between actor, director and scriptwriter, overseeing every element. What was it like to turn up solely to act? “I’ll tell you the difference: I wasn’t captain of this ship, and that is fantastic. It’s nice when the ship and captain are running properly. When you feel like, ‘I can just focus on this character and no one’s going to fall apart behind me.’ It’s great. I can just play and discover.”
As a writer-producer-actor-director-poet, Coel is a classic example of her generation’s favoured multi-hyphen career plan. After a short-lived stint studying political science at university, she decided to pursue the arts. But it’s not easy explaining to first-generation-immigrant parents, who weren’t afforded the same opportunities, that you’re going to risk it all. We discuss the fact that there are certain milestones you have to hit before your career seems real to your family (sold-out shows, media coverage and Bafta wins being helpful), and Coel laughs softly as she tells me she’s really good at leaving institutions. “I mean, pre-drama school, it was like, ‘What the hell are you doing?’ You know, I dropped out of college, I dropped out of uni – twice. My mum didn’t have much when she came here. It’s very scary when you then see your child on nothing, just writing poetry. Now my mum is my biggest fan, and she makes my dresses. She’s very proud and embracing and supportive of my kind of quirkiness.”
Success hasn’t changed her life hugely. On her Twitter biography, Coel’s location is set to “houseshare in LDN”, and that’s exactly where she lives. The cosy-looking bedroom you see in her Twitter videos resembles that of most young renters in London. “I’ve lived with Ash for three years now and I found him on SpareRoom. We lived in a four-bed and then when I left I was like, ‘Ash, you rolling?’ And he was like, ‘Yeah.’ So now we live in a two-bed, and we have the best time: sit down, watch TV, go for a run sometimes, do yoga. Ash is solid.” Ash is not, she assures me, the Ash we meet in Chewing Gum series two, a problematic white man who gets Tracey to dress up in “tribal costume” before sex, a particularly funny and shocking scene that screams fetishism. “I don’t think I named him after anyone. I told him, ‘Once you watch it, you’ll know it’s not based on you.’”
Coel has a boyfriend but won’t talk about him, a testament to how much she values her privacy. It’s a position at odds with her Instagram generation, where relationships, jobs and careers all flourish online. In fact, she no longer has the app on her phone (her Instagram bio reads: “Vegan. Not currently using social media.”) Things were different when she first started out as a poet. “I used to be really loose with the amount of information I put out on social media because in the beginning I was not a known poet. I have to sell this place out, or I’m not gonna break even – so I soon discovered that my personality is a way to draw people in. As my career has stabilised, I feel like I need to retreat more.”
She battles with the same anxieties as most twenty- or thirtysomethings living in London: where to be, how to split your time between friends and family, how to maintain a healthy sex life, eat well, exercise and stay sane in a city that seems to move at the speed of light. “The number one thing in self-care, for me,” she says, “is not caring what people would think of you.” As someone who values connection with people on an intimate level, how does she deal with fans running over and stopping her in the street? “Even if I’ve had a bad day, I have to access the bit of me that isn’t negative. Because sometimes I have bumped into someone who recognised me, and we’ve stood outside a shop for an hour, just talking, because there’s so much to say. And there’s a reason that person likes your work. It’s because they’ve got a similar brain to you – so sometimes that’s a way of navigating it. I go into situations knowing there’s something valuable I can get from every interaction. I can learn.”
At the same time, she is often uncomfortable with fame. “It’s so complex, but I am determined to keep my own sense of humanity, which is why I don’t go out too much. Because sometimes I start feeling like an alien, and I don’t want to.” She has to stay disciplined about her downtime, because many of her friends are also her collaborators, among them Radio 1 DJ Clara Amfo, who produced the music for the Chewing Gum ads; rapper Kojey Radical, whose most recent video Coel narrates; and Arinzé Kene, Coel’s co-star in the new Netflix musical Been So Long.
She avoids alcohol. “I don’t drink; I smoke,” she smiles, explaining: “Creative juices.” That, and embarking on writers’ retreats. “The first time was when I was writing Chewing Gum, in 2014. A lovely couple who live in London saw me do a poem and let me go in their place instead. It was unreal. It’s nice to be by nature. I’ve been to so many places: Zurich, Berlin, Lake Tahoe, twice, Somerset, Cornwall. It’s nice to clear my head. In London, there are too many friends.”
Coel recommends a book, Act Accordingly by American author Colin Wright, which she says has helped her focus on what matters, rather than on the labels that come her way. Wright uses the example of a cake – how all the icing and sprinkles are just a distraction – and Coel uses a similar analogy when talking about her own writing process. “It’s almost like, I see a person, and I see them when I’m writing as a cake. What did it take to make the cake? Oh, OK, I like the idea of egg, and that’s a spinach courgette wrap. OK, egg and spinach, I like that – let me put that together. So it’s like there are bits of eggs… I’m vegan!” She laughs at the muddledness of her metaphor, then carries on. “Cauliflower, chicken – let me just mix that all together. So it’s like, you wouldn’t be able to detect yourself like you couldn’t detect sugar in a cake.”
These days, she gets to her own essential ingredients through meditation rather than religion. (In old YouTube videos, she declares her love of God with the utmost passion and devotion.) “I would rather be nice and share and be strong – religion isn’t a part of my life at all.” She moved away from Christianity during her final year of drama school, in 2012. “I was in this limbo of ‘Jesus was my Church’, and then I was like, ‘Why is God a He?’” Distancing herself from something she’d known, loved and nurtured was not easy. “It’s never a conscious challenge – it sneaks up on you so that suddenly you’re thinking, ‘That doesn’t make sense to me.’ You have a duty as a Christian to minister, and then I’m hanging out with a gay guy from Wales and thinking, ‘I don’t feel like I need to tell you about Jesus.’ And that’s scary. ‘I feel like you’re good. I’ve got some stuff I need to learn from you.’ Which is why it started to fade.”
Barely out of her 20s, Coel has already gone through so many incarnations – from performing at poetry slams to selling out theatre shows and starring in a primetime drama. Until recently, the most relatable black women in the mainstream media came from the US; now, Coel has carved out that space for us Brits, starting with a milestone show that was completely unafraid of making people feel uncomfortable. While she can’t confirm Chewing Gum’s third series, she remains committed to supporting the next generation of misfits and starting awkward conversations with her writing. “I love finding where I can laugh in my pain,” she explains. “I think it’s vital. I’ll always have that about me.”
By Liv Little, www.theguardian.com - August 11th, 2018
• Liv Little is editor-in-chief of gal-dem. Black Earth Rising will be on BBC2 in September; Been So Long will appear on Netflix in the autumn.
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