Michaela Coel
Michaela Coel is an actor, born 1988.
Chewing Gum arrived on E4 in 2015 with Coel writing it and playing Tracey Gordon, and it won her the BAFTA Award for Best Female Comedy Performance. Before that she was taking the parts a young British actor takes: Kayla in Top Boy, a journalist in London Spy, an airline stewardess in Black Mirror, Kelly in Monsters: Dark Continent, Lilyhot in The Aliens.
I May Destroy You, in 2020, is the reason the rest of it matters. She created it, wrote it and played Arabella Essiuedu, won the British Academy Television Award for Best Actress in 2021, and became the first Black woman to win the Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Writing for a Limited Series, Movie or Dramatic Special. What she does that most actor-writers will not is refuse to protect her own character. Arabella is often wrong and often unkind, and the show never steps in to explain her.
Since then she has taken other people's projects rather than building a second vehicle: Aneka in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Lori Butler in The Christophers, Sam Anselm in Mother Mary. Kate Ashby in Black Earth Rising is the closest thing here to a straight dramatic lead written by somebody else. Her Star Wars credit, a Resistance monitor, sits in the same filmography as the Emmy, which is a fair picture of how quickly this went.
Movies (5)
TV (9)
Where to start with Michaela Coel
Watch I May Destroy You first, and watch it in order rather than sampling it. It is the whole argument for her, the writing and the performance at once, and the refusal to make Arabella easy to side with is what separates it from everything else on this list.
Chewing Gum is the useful companion and it is genuinely funny rather than an apprentice piece. The same instinct for humiliation is there, played for laughs. After that, Black Earth Rising shows her carrying a serious drama somebody else wrote, and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever shows the studio version of her. Top Boy and Black Mirror are for completists, small parts from before anyone was building shows around her.