Michaela Coel: From Chewing Gum to I May Destroy You

Before Chewing Gum became television, Michaela Coel was designing flyers, building a set and putting together programmes for her own play. She recalled that exhausting combination in a 2025 interview with British Vogue. The young performer who carried fifteen characters on stage was also doing the work needed to bring an audience into the room. Her later credits as writer, actor, director and producer grew from an early experience of making the whole thing happen. ¹

London, poetry and drama school

Coel was born in London in 1987 and is of Ghanaian heritage. Her work crossed spoken word, music and theatre. Performing as Michaela the Poet, she appeared at London venues and released an album in 2009. That year she began training at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, while her talent was also nurtured by Talawa. The combination placed her own writing alongside the discipline of actor training. ²

Her introduction to theatre had come much earlier. In her MacTaggart Lecture, Coel recalled growing up on a council estate in the City of London, close to financial institutions that seemed to inhabit another world. Her mother discovered free workshops for children from families on low incomes, and Coel joined Bridewell Youth Theatre at eight. She remembered the pleasure of playing together and the sadness when a production ended and its company dispersed. ³

Chewing Gum Dreams began as her Guildhall graduation project. After leaving the school, she took it to the Yard Theatre in Hackney Wick. The monologue won the Alfred Fagon Award in 2012, an early recognition of her writing within Black British theatre. It subsequently reached venues including the Bush, Manchester’s Royal Exchange and the National Theatre, where it was staged in 2014. A piece made during training was developing a public life of its own. ^{4, 5}

Tracey Gordon finds television

The production company Retort read the play and approached Coel about television. A short taster and a reading for Channel 4 led to funding for online Comedy Blaps, then a series. Chewing Gum began on E4 in 2015. Its central character, Tracey Gordon, had grown from fourteen in the play to twenty-four on television, while retaining an innocence that made encounters with adult life unpredictable. ^{4, 6}

Coel described Tracey’s competing attachments to Christianity and Beyoncé as fundamental to the comedy. Tracey could be brave and curious, but also jealous, dishonest or insecure. The estate mattered as much as the heroine: Coel wanted viewers to recognise a place they might enjoy living, with a culture shaped by shared economic circumstances. She drew on people, schooldays and friendships she knew, then made a fictional community with its own comic possibilities. ⁶

Susan Wokoma played Cynthia, Tracey’s younger sister, whose religious certainty becomes unsettled as Tracey explores a wider life. Wokoma recalled how easily she and Coel made each other laugh during filming. An unexpected gesture could surprise the writer with a new version of a character she had imagined. Having first worked together in a play in 2013, Wokoma also witnessed Coel’s expanding responsibilities on set and the cast’s determination to support her. ⁷

In 2016, Coel won BAFTA’s Female Performance in a Comedy Programme award for Chewing Gum. It followed her Television Craft award for Breakthrough Talent. The recognition encompassed the performance audiences saw and the emerging creative talent behind it. ⁸

Black Earth Rising and a Camden musical

Acting in other writers’ work opened different demands. In Hugo Blick’s Black Earth Rising, Coel played Kate Ashby, a legal investigator rescued as a child from the Rwandan genocide and raised in England. Kate’s search for answers reaches into international politics and her own uncertain past. Coel prepared by exploring displacement, adoption, repression and trauma, distinguishing the character’s limited memories from the wider historical knowledge she needed to acquire. ⁹

The preparation was practical too. Coel learned received pronunciation, some French, sculling, breaststroke and snorkelling. Speaking about the role, she explained that Kate could not even remember her original name. That absence shaped the character’s relationship with everything she was told about herself. Coel admired Blick’s sustained commitment to writing the series and sought scripts that challenged her understanding as well as her performance. ⁹

The 2018 musical Been So Long returned her to London streets. Directed by Tinge Krishnan, it follows Simone, a single mother drawn into an unexpected romance during a night out in Camden. Ché Walker wrote the screenplay, adapting the stage work associated with him and composer Arthur Darvill. Producers Amanda Jenks and Nadine Marsh-Edwards brought together a cast including Coel, Arinzé Kene, Ronke Adekoluejo and Rakie Ayola. ¹⁰

The film reunited Coel with important early supporters. She had seen the stage production in 2009. Walker, who had encouraged her to act after hearing her poetry, had invited her to classes and introduced her to Kene, her future leading man. Coel also wanted Simone to be a dark-skinned Black woman with a shaved head, a romantic heroine whose appearance she rarely saw reflected on screen. ¹¹

Singing returned her to another part of her early practice. Coel had released the album Fixing Barbie and performed in Home, a stage production based on a homeless shelter. She described her voice as limited in range, but felt its imperfections could belong to Simone. The musical allowed her to build a character through the sound of a voice as well as through dialogue. ¹¹

Speaking to the television industry

In August 2018, Coel delivered the Edinburgh Television Festival’s MacTaggart Lecture. She asked for greater openness about budgets, contracts and the treatment of new writers. She also publicly discussed having been sexually assaulted during a break from writing, focusing on the support she needed afterwards. Her argument connected working conditions with creative opportunity: inviting unfamiliar voices into television carried responsibilities that continued beyond commissioning a programme. ³

Creative authority remained a practical issue on I May Destroy You. In a 2020 Nylon interview, Coel described expecting resistance to her decisions because she was accustomed to having to argue for them. Instead, her new collaborators made clear that they were there to listen. Learning to work with that support required an adjustment. She had executive producer credit and a directing role, alongside writing and performing the series. ¹³

The many lives of I May Destroy You

I May Destroy You arrived in 2020 as a BBC and HBO co-production. Coel played Arabella, a writer whose online success has brought a book commission and mounting pressure. Following a sexual assault, Arabella reassesses her relationships, work and sense of herself. The drama moves through her everyday surroundings as she tries to understand what happened and how to continue. Its fictional characters and storylines develop beyond the personal experience that informed Coel’s writing. ¹²

Coel made the series with Various Artists Limited and her company FALKNA Productions. Sam Miller directed alongside her; Phil Clarke and Roberto Troni were executive producers for Various Artists. Weruche Opia and Paapa Essiedu joined an ensemble that also included Aml Ameen and Sarah Niles. ¹²

Opia’s Terry and Essiedu’s Kwame have stories that extend beyond supporting Arabella. Coel told Nylon that friends who knew she was writing about consent had shared experiences with her. The result gives friendship its own difficult questions: people can care for one another while misunderstanding what support requires. Terry’s experiences and Kwame’s encounters bring different pressures into a drama whose perspective keeps widening. ¹³

Coel told Sight and Sound that she began with an opening and some sense of an ending, discovering the intervening story as she wrote. Directing required another kind of attention. She wanted actors to understand their characters’ motives, even in uncomfortable scenes. She also praised focus puller Mairead Albiston and the editors for preserving what she wanted to communicate. The finished work depended on other people recognising its intentions and carrying them through their own craft. ²

Awards and a manifesto for misfits

The 2021 BAFTAs recognised several parts of that work. Coel won for leading actress, while I May Destroy You won the mini-series award. At the Television Craft ceremony, she won for drama writing and shared the fiction directing award with Sam Miller; the editing team also won. These were honours for a production whose achievements extended across the writing, performance, direction and final shaping of its episodes. ^{14, 15}

At the 2021 Emmys, Coel won for writing a limited or anthology series or movie. She was also nominated as a lead actress, director and executive producer. ¹⁶

Her first book, Misfits: A Personal Manifesto, appeared in 2021. Building on the MacTaggart Lecture, it connects her London upbringing and discovery of theatre with questions of belonging and creative freedom. Its argument asks for honesty and care towards people who are made to feel outside an established world. The book carries those concerns into a different form, drawing on personal anecdotes rather than a cast of fictional characters. ¹⁷

Wakanda, Mother Mary and The Christophers

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever gave Coel a major film role in 2022 as Aneka, one of Wakanda’s Dora Milaje warriors. She undertook demanding training in Atlanta alongside performers with extensive stunt experience. In a Good Morning America interview, she described Aneka as someone willing to break rules to protect other people. Playing a queer Black character also mattered to her: she welcomed the opportunity to broaden representation through a film with such an extensive audience. ¹⁸

Her television acting brought another Emmy in 2024, for guest actress in a drama series. She won for playing Bev in the “Infidelity” episode of Mr. & Mrs. Smith. ¹⁶

Mother Mary, released in 2026, paired Coel with Anne Hathaway in a film written and directed by David Lowery. Hathaway plays a pop star preparing to return to public performance, while Coel plays the stylist she has betrayed. Their reunion develops into a supernatural reckoning, bringing Coel’s acting into an intense encounter between two women with a shared creative history. ¹⁹

In an A24 conversation, Hathaway observed that Coel and Lowery connected through their shared experience as writers and their attention to language. Lowery described watching Coel deliver the stylist Sam’s dialogue with an eloquence he wished he possessed in everyday conversation. Hathaway, meanwhile, chose to play the singer as emotionally depleted. Their contrasting performances gave the exchanges a deliberately uneven balance of power. ²⁰

Steven Soderbergh’s The Christophers placed Coel opposite Ian McKellen. She plays Lori, a forger hired by the estranged children of McKellen’s artist, Julian Sklar, to gain access to unfinished paintings. Posing as an assistant, she enters a scheme designed to secure an inheritance. Jessica Gunning and James Corden complete the principal cast. The story makes artistic work the subject of negotiation and deception, with Coel’s character entering the private territory of an established figure. ²¹

New writing between Britain and Ghana

By February 2026, filming was under way on First Day on Earth, a ten-episode BBC and HBO series written by Coel. She plays Henri, a British-Ghanaian novelist whose arrival in Ghana unsettles her understanding of herself and her family. The announced cast included Thandiwe Newton, Maxine Peake, Danny Sapani and Ncuti Gatwa. Coel and Sam Miller were again directing, with Various Artists producing in association with A24. The project continued her collaboration with people who had helped bring I May Destroy You to the screen. ²²

Coel had also begun making room for other writers. In 2025, she described hosting a quiet writing space in her London flat for women and girls of colour living at home. She called it the River Library. Actor and writer Gracie Oddie-James used it to work on a television pilot. The practical offer was time and a place to concentrate: resources that can determine whether a story advances beyond the idea its writer is carrying. ¹

Sources

1. British Vogue — Michaela Coel on fame, work and her next television series.

2. BFI Sight and Sound — The misfit-education of Michaela Coel.

3. Televisual — Michaela Coel’s MacTaggart Lecture, full transcript.

4. Guildhall School of Music & Drama — Michaela Coel, BA Acting.

5. Alfred Fagon Award — 2012 Award: Michaela Coel.

6. Channel 4 — Interview with Michaela Coel, September 2015.

7. Channel 4 — Interview with Susan Wokoma for Chewing Gum.

8. BAFTA — House of Fraser British Academy Television Awards winners, 2016.

9. The Boar — An interview with Michaela Coel about Black Earth Rising.

10. British Council UK Films Database — Been So Long.

11. TheGrio — Michaela Coel on her role in Been So Long.

12. HBO Pressroom — New series I May Destroy You debuts this June.

13. Nylon — Michaela Coel knows her voice is rare.

14. BAFTA — Virgin Media British Academy Television Awards winners, 2021.

15. BAFTA — British Academy Television Craft Awards winners, 2021.

16. Television Academy — Michaela Coel awards and nominations.

17. Penguin Books — Misfits: A Personal Manifesto.

18. ABC News / Good Morning America — Michaela Coel on playing Aneka.

19. A24 — Mother Mary.

20. A24 — Weeping Bleeding Hearts: David Lowery and Anne Hathaway in conversation.

21. NEON — The Christophers.

22. HBO Pressroom — First Day on Earth cast and production announcement, February 2026.