Sam? Hey! Oh, I'm sorry, I'm really really excited to hear your voice.

I was very excited to talk to my guest for this episode. She was at a studio in New York and I was

an LA and yeah when we began our chat when the lines connected I came in kind of hot.

I'll just elaborate on the moment. I promise I won't y'all that loud entire interview.

How you doing, Sam? I'm good. I'm gonna calm it down.

Calm it right.

From NPR I'm Sam Sanders. It's been a minute. That voice you're hearing that is Mikaela Cole,

the award-winning actress, screenwriter, singer, songwriter, poet, and playwright.

And yeah, I am really into her work in her career. A lot of you may know Mikaela from her role as

Tracy on the British sitcom Chewing Gum. On that show she plays this wonderfully awkward and

brazen, recovering pinnacostal on a mission to lose her virginities. I'll just be having a

little kind of sexy dream. It gets to intense and then I'll squirt blood out my nostrils.

Mikaela Cole is also the star of a new thriller streaming right now on Netflix. It's called Black

Earth Rising. This show is all about race and genocide and international human rights law.

I don't remember my family. All my country. I don't know my own name. The only thing I know is

that it happened to nearly a million people and I will never forget it.

In this chat Mikaela and I talk about both those shows, how she went from spoken word poetry to

TV and how she moves through the industry as a black woman challenging just about all of the

industry's expectations of her. As I said Mikaela was in New York. I was in LA. Microphone levels were

adjusted. Enjoy. Before we dig into all your recent current work, I do want to say we have one

big thing in common that excites me. We both shave our heads. How did I have a feeling you

were going to say something that's changed in me and because you're not here you can't see that my

...