Theo attends school with Arabella (who was the focus of Part 1 of this series of articles) and Terry.
This final instalment focuses on a character called Theo and the events that occurred when she was a youth, during her high school years. There’s one in all of us, so if you’re aware of it, you can manage it and be a socially responsible human being.” In the show’s Halloween episode, Coel draws on this imagery directly.This blog series examines some of the sexual offences encountered by the main characters in the explosive 12-part BBC series, ‘I May Destroy You’.
“I enjoy constantly being aware of all of those parts within myself,” she explained, “because it makes sure I keep control of the devil in me. In “Loveless,” the wife, Zhenya (Maryana Spivak), tells her estranged mother “You’re God and the Devil rolled into one.” This line really spoke to Coel. When she watched “Loveless,” Zvyagintsev’s 2017 film about a divorcing couple, Coel realized the director was telling the same story of internal contradictions as in “Leviathan,” but in a different way.
She mimicked that scene in Episode 8, when the police officer reads aloud a lengthy update to Arabella’s case in equally alienating legalese. In that moment, facing the members of the court and standing alone with his eyes downcast, Kolya “is processing that the world sees him as worthy of a criminal conviction,” Coel said. In this court scene, he listens as the official reads, in rapid-fire and opaque legal language, his sentence of 15 years in prison. Kolya assaults his wife, and at the end of the film he is wrongly convicted of her murder. The bleak 2014 film “Leviathan” tells the story of Kolya, a mechanic (Alexey Serebryakov) who is fighting to save his home from a corrupt mayor who wants the land. We see the internal worlds of Arabella’s friends, too: Terry (Weruche Opia) is the attentive best friend harboring a secret, while Kwame (Paapa Essiedu) challenges stereotypes about what it means to be a strong Black man, and what it means to be a gay man.Ĭoel found more inspiration for her characters’ dualities in two of Andrey Zvyagintsev’s films. She’s always been a woman too, but “she never saw it,” Coel explained, “because she was choosing where she put the character of trauma.” After joining an all-female support group for survivors of sexual assault and finding comfort in their shared experiences, Arabella wondered, “Am I too late to serve this tribe called women?” “This was crucial to how I crafted Arabella, how I crafted every single character in ‘I May Destroy You,’” Coel said, “because there is a duality that exists within every character.” Arabella’s assault forces her to consider her identity as a woman, with all the dangers associated with that gender, when previously she had been “busy being Black and poor,” as she said in Episode 7. It was only when she watched the series that Coel really understood how the show’s creator, Hugo Blick, used Kate’s fight to accept a new part of her identity to interrogate how we define ourselves. The early PDFs she sent to the BBC - which included photos of gay Black couples with similar builds as inspiration for the character Kwame’s story line, links to yoga retreats for women of color and images of industrial chic interiors - held only some of the inspirations Coel drew on for the series.Ĭoel starred in this tense 2018 Netflix drama series as Kate, a Londoner whose discovery about her heritage complicates the way she sees herself and her place in the world.
While “ I May Destroy You” ostensibly follows the London-based writer Arabella (Coel) as she processes a sexual assault, the 12-episode series also confronts the frames through which we see ourselves and each other. “I was trying to help him imagine what it might be,” she said, laughing, “but it’s only in hindsight I realize that I was just sending pictures.” So she collected images from the internet, put them onto PDFs and sent them to Piers Wenger, the BBC’s head of drama programming. Her series “ I May Destroy You,” which airs on HBO in the United States, had been greenlit by the broadcaster without executives having “a clue” what she was planning, Coel said in a recent Zoom interview. LONDON - Before she sent scripts to the BBC, Michaela Coel sent mood boards.