Seven things we learned from Michaela Coel on Woman's Hour
This feature deals with adult themes
Michaela Coel’s award-winning 大象传媒 drama I May Destroy You catapulted her to fame and helped fuel many of lockdown’s big cultural talking points, from diversity on screen to ‘stealthing’ and period sex on TV.
Now the screenwriter, director, producer and actor has written her first book, Misfits: A Personal Manifesto, a call for honesty, empathy and inclusion which seeks to champion those who don’t fit in.
It takes on the topics she explored in her MacTaggart lecture at 2018’s Edinburgh Festival, from the barriers and racism she experienced in the TV industry to her sexual assault.
Michaela spoke to Woman’s Hour’s Emma Barnett about the book, social media, the law around sexual assault, period sex scenes and much more. Here are some of the things we learned…
1. Writing for TV does not always pay well
Michaela says it is “really important” for her to talk openly about money as she remembers being a young writer without a financial “safety net” to catch her.
“When you write, sometimes the cash doesn't flow like other people's jobs, so you don't get weekly or monthly pay, sometimes you're not paid for six months,” she says, recalling a writing trip in Switzerland where she had to choose whether to spend her money on food or thrush medication.
“I still meet young British writers who are living at home in a very tiny bedroom and they simply aren't quite being paid enough. And so, they take on four different writing projects to try and make ends meet, but it's really hard. We often don't consider the financial constraints that creatives are going through whilst we ask them to have all these free-flowing, huge, confident ideas.
“It's Virginia Woolf that talks about ‘a room of one’s own’ isn't it? And if the room is like a cupboard, it's going to be hard.”
2. But she doesn’t need a million dollars
Last year Michaela revealed she’d turned down a big money deal with Netflix to collaborate with the 大象传媒 on I May Destroy You. She told Emma Barnett how she felt during the negotiations.
“I remember feeling like people found me disturbed. It was almost like, ‘she's a crazy woman’, you know? That's the other one. She's either 'difficult' or she's 'crazy'. To the point that I began to think that I was crazy, or unnecessarily paranoid. At that stage it's hard to really say to people ‘trust your gut and follow your instincts’, because it's not a very useful sentence all the time, but that is what I did in that situation. And I’m so glad I did.”
She does admit that saying no to a million bucks is a cool situation to be in.
“And I think it's even cooler if you realise that you don't need a million dollars. I was living at that time in a house share with lovely Ash, my housemate, and I had enough food to eat. I did not need a million dollars, which means I can make the decision whether I take that or not. What is behind that million dollars? When you can say no to a million dollars because you've realised you do have enough, even though it's not lots, then that's awesome.”
3. She never doubted whether she should talk about her sexual assault publicly
Michaela’s own sexual assault – which happened on a night out while she was adapting her one woman play Chewing Gum into a TV show - inspired her character Arabella’s central story in I May Destroy You. Before that she had spoken publicly about it in real life, in her MacTaggart lecture - a decision she says she never questioned.
“I wasn't nervous about whether what I was going to say was right or wrong, I was just nervous because everything was very heightened. There's a very big stage, there are all these people who are professionals and I'm supposed to speak to them. That is terrifying. But never was my terror about whether I should say what I'm going to say or not.
“I had been vocal about it to my workplace, so it wasn't the first time I had ever said it - it was the first time I'd ever said it into a microphone. It felt very freeing to dare to share that information, because I know that other people have had similar experiences.”
4. She thinks the law around sexual assault is ‘a mess’
“My therapist said to me from the very beginning in my first session with her, which took place a few days after I was assaulted, she said my closure cannot be in relation to the case, to whatever happens with this person. My closure has to be irrelevant to whether they find them or not. And that's what I would say to anybody listening, that it can't be about that, because it's a mess,” says Michaela.
“The judiciary system - when it comes to sexual assault and rape - is a mess, and if our closure hinged on finding the perpetrators of these crimes and prosecuting them, then many of us would be broken for the rest of our lives. So, we have to find a way to find strength and to work our way through trauma irrelevant of that.”
5. She followed the secondary schools #MeToo movement earlier this year
Michaela remembers listening to the Woman’s Hour coverage as thousands of teenage girls started sharing their experiences of sexual harassment and assault in schools through online spaces such as Everyone’s Invited.
“What I remember finding very interesting were the people who felt their sons ‘couldn't possibly’. ‘How? Not my son, it isn't my son.’ And I don't know how we wrestle with that. How we wrestle with the fact that the person you raised, and your loved one and your ‘dear sweet boy', might not be educated about how to engage with women, and sometimes with other boys, you know?
“We might need to stop seeing our children with these rose-tinted glasses and instead look at our sons as the future men of society, who could cause great harm or great joy to society. And let's try and figure out how to make them joy-givers.”
6. She’s not really on social media anymore
“It's very hard for the complexity of your thought and your opinion to land well on Twitter. It flattens everything. It's making us hard to understand each other,” she says of the ‘cancel culture’ often fuelled by social media these days.
“I'm not really there anymore. I have some little secret accounts just with my name, I have a Twitter, I barely use it. Maybe it's useful to keep taking breaks from social media, but I think people struggle. If you cannot help but go into Instagram when you've told yourself ‘I'm not going to check Instagram’, then it genuinely means you've got a problem.
“I would delete the app and then I would be on my phone and my thumb would be swiping across the screen, and I'd realise that my thumb was looking for the app that I deleted. I was so involved with it that it was in my muscle memory. And so, I think it's good to have mastery over that. That doesn't mean give it up, or delete it forever, but I think it just means have boundaries with social media.”
Michaela Coel: 'I remember feeling like people found me disturbed'
The I May Destroy You creator on turning down a million-dollar deal.
7. She put period sex on TV in all its glory because ‘why would I resist?’
When it comes to period sex, I May Destroy You’s now infamous intimate scene will be remembered by many women as the first and only time they’ve seen it portrayed on screen. And Michaela wasn’t shy about it.
“Why did there have to be a clot?” says Michaela. “Because sometimes there is a clot, do you know what I mean? Sometimes there is a clot and if I can show that, why would I then resist showing that? Because it might make people feel weird? But it can happen. That's what can happen to so many of us.”
Listen to Michaela Coel’s interview with Emma Barnett in full on 大象传媒 Sounds, where you can also find every episode of the Woman’s Hour podcast that you may have missed.
