Michaela Coel on Making “I May Destroy You”

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

News, Wnyc, David, Arts, Yorker, Society & Culture, Storytelling, Books, New, Remnick, Politics

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 14 July 2020

⏱️ 21 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The protagonist of “I May Destroy You,” a young woman named Arabella, has her drink spiked at a party and discovers afterward that she has been assaulted. She spends the rest of the show untangling what happened to her. And yet the HBO series is not a crime drama but a nuanced and sometimes comedic exploration of the emotional toll of surviving assault. The series—written and directed by, and starring, Michaela Coel—is based on Coel’s own experience. Coel tells Doreen St. Félix that she was assaulted while working on the second season of her celebrated BBC show “Chewing Gum.” She took notes about what happened, and some of that material made it into the new show, while other aspects are fictional. Of Arabella, who often wears a pink wig, Coel says, “You don't know where she begins and where I end.”

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:08.9	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.
0:12.4	Michaela Cole's television career took off really fast in 2016, with the debut of a show that she created called Chewing Gumb.
0:20.3	It was a goofy, cringy comedy about a young woman from a religious background,
0:25.0	trying desperately to lose her virginity.
0:28.4	Chewing Gum seemed, at least in some regards, to Mirror Cole's own life,
0:32.6	and it won her prestigious BAFTA Award,
0:34.9	Britain's equivalent of an Emmy or an Oscar.
0:37.9	I May Destroy You is the title of Michaela Cole's new show, which is on HBO.
0:43.1	She wrote and directed the series, and she stars in it too, playing a young writer living in East London.
0:49.1	The story is also drawn from Cole's own life, but the subject matter is much darker.
0:56.1	And the assault, you recall?
0:58.2	The thing in my head?
0:59.8	Yes.
1:01.2	Yeah, I wouldn't, because now you're calling it, something that I never.
1:06.0	Do you see anyone else?
1:13.1	Where? In this memory.
1:15.2	You can't call it a memory.
1:18.9	Okay, other than the man in the...
1:22.1	In my head.
1:23.7	Michaela Cole spoke last week with our TV critic Doreen St. Felix.
1:28.3	So I'd like to just kind of start off by asking, how does it feel to have it out in the world?
	...

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