Meet Michaela Coel: the rising star behind Chewing Gum, E4's new drama about London estate life

Her one-woman play about an east London estate electrified audiences, and now Michaela Coel has turned it into an E4 series. Gabriel Tate meets a new star
Poet, singer-songwriter, screenwriter, playwright and award winning actress Michaela Coel
Rebecca Reid
Gabriel Tate18 September 2015

The first time I saw Michaela Coel was with a man on a date in a Chinese restaurant in Ealing. She was chewing seductively on a fork, wearing an outfit pitched somewhere between Crazy in Love era Beyoncé and Sandy from Grease. The man sitting opposite her looked understandably alarmed. And then the straight faces crumbled and someone called “Cut!”

“That was the first day I actually burst out laughing during shooting,” Coel recalls some weeks later at Channel 4 HQ, less dressy but with dazzling smile and cackling laugh in full effect. “You must have got a very strange impression of the show.”

The 26-year-old has been one to watch ever since her scintillating monologue, Chewing Gum Dreams, electrified London’s fringe theatre in 2012. She’s become a fixture in National Theatre productions and a commissioned writer at the Royal Court, but E4’s Chewing Gum should mark the moment when a brilliant talent cherished by the cognoscenti becomes a bona fide star.

The title is no coincidence. But while Coel’s play focused on artless, vulnerable 14-year-old Tracey Gordon, Chewing Gum’s Tracey is 24, still played by Coel and still an innocent but unable to suppress her natural urges. Pinballing between straitlaced sister Cynthia (Susie Wokoma) and worldly best friend Candice (Danielle Walters), Tracey is going through adolescence in her mid-twenties. She is, says Coel, “kind of delightful”.

Likewise the show itself, a vivacious portrait of London estate life, played with the openness and magnificently filthy wit of its creator. Who, incidentally, explains her preference for Rihanna over Tracey’s idol, Beyoncé, because “I can imagine Rihanna taking a shit. If I imagine Beyoncé on the toilet, there’s nothing happening. Rihanna’s got diarrhoea, I can see everything.”

Michaele Cole as Tracey in Chewing Gum
Channel 4

Brought up by her mum on estates in Hackney and Tower Hamlets, Coel drew on her own experiences for Chewing Gum — “the sort of life you don’t see very often on TV”. Tracey’s sexual naiveté, for example, reflects Coel’s celibacy between the ages of 17 and 22. “I had a massive conversion to this very Pentecostal, demon-exorcising church,” she says. “Getting to the point where I started to do not such a good job of being celibate was awkward and horrible. So much guilt. Psychologically, I was in a whirlwind.”

Although long estranged from that church, Coel has no regrets about a period that, she says, gave her the focus and confidence to write and perform the poetry that became her vocation. “I wrote a poem on May 22, 2006,” she recalls. “Three days later I found a poetry bar in Ealing and sat there until I went up to the barman and said, ‘You’ve got a mic, can I do a poem?’ Eventually he let me on. Someone saw it, liked it, got my number, and it went from there.”

Where it went was nationwide, to venues ranging from student unions to Wembley Arena (“worst experience of my life — who reads a poem in Wembley Arena?”). Encouraged by playwright and director Ché Walker, she applied for drama school.

Walker’s intervention was timely. Coel was “making a semi-living and having crazy fun” but drifting, having dropped out of college and then out of university — twice. Winning a scholarship to Guildhall School of Music and Drama proved a culture shock for all concerned.

“I was the first black girl they’d had in five years and the only person in my year whose parents weren’t homeowners,” she says, shaking her head. “It felt a bit like the school for Downton Abbey’s next stars. They were really friendly but I struggled with the fear I had of people from different places. Once I got over that, I made friends for life.”

Poet: Michaela Coel Rebecca Reid
Rebecca Reid

Chewing Gum Dreams arrived more or less fully formed as Coel’s graduation piece. She approached Hackney Wick’s Yard Theatre, doing everything from set design to publicity for half the door fee. After rave reviews and a transfer to the Shed at the National, she was approached about a series. Long reticent about television, Coel had to be coerced into auditioning, successfully, for Channel 4’s rather grimmer take on estate life, Top Boy. “I didn’t think my features would work,” she says. “They’re just too big in the camera.”

Happily, the “amazing” experience persuaded her otherwise and after two online-only shorts established a lighter tone and more episodic pacing, Chewing Gum was commissioned. “I was always told by other writers I’d lose control, but it didn’t really happen,” Coel says. “ The director let me run wild on set,” she grins, “so I was very vocal. I trust my instincts more now, but I’ll always need other people to advise me. Drama school taught me not to be precious.”

Coel cites John Keats, Simon Russell Beale, Lucian Msamati and Marianne Jean-Baptiste as inspirations. The latter is telling. While we agree it’s absurd that it should still be an issue, Coel remains depressingly unusual in a world where prominent young, black, working-class female voices are at a premium. She sighs.

Michaela Coel with the cast of Chewing Gum
Channel 4

“I don’t write with this thing in the back of my head about carrying the weight of young black women on my shoulders. Black isn’t something I became after a car crash that I’ve been dealing with ever since. I’d like the colour of my skin to not be a factor in my life at all.”

Significantly, Chewing Gum isn’t really about race. If anything, the wider themes are class and community. “Exactly,” she nods. “On my estate everyone’s different racially but economic circumstances give people a particular culture. I know Tower Hamlets is one of the poorest boroughs in the UK but I’d rather write about all the great stuff than the misery. I wanted to make the estate a place where people would want to live. I loved my estate!”

London is, she agrees, the unspoken character of the series. “London is two situations running parallel. On my estate there’s been no change apart from when we got new windows. It’s everything around that keeps changing.

“Tracey lives on an estate opposite Pret and RBS. A restaurant called Itsu pops up and no one knows what’s going on. The show’s about being close to this other world, reaching for it and not knowing why you’re reaching for it or can’t quite grab it.”

Best TV dramas 2015 - in pictures

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Coel is visibly thrilled that Chewing Gum Dreams is now a popular choice for drama-school auditions. But while it may now be part of the canon, Tracey’s life continues. Coel is already working on scripts for a possible second series and has the lead role in Aliens, an E4 comedy drama from the creators of Misfits. “I don’t want to switch off. I like to work.”

This is manifestly true, yet without grants, bursaries and scholarships, it’s possible Coel’s work would never have reached a wider audience. Deeper Government cuts will further restrict access to the arts but it’s typical of Coel that her anger and despondency can’t dampen her natural optimism.

“Don’t sit there and complain. Rub your hands together and figure out what to do. We can put fear of the future in front of us to block us, or behind us to drive us forward. I feel like telling all the people who look like me to start trying to write. You don’t know it’s possible because it’s not often in front of you.”

She thinks back to the immediacy of her early performances at the Yard and the reactions they provoked. “To see people laughing or crying or listening, then being inspired to do their own thing? I can’t think of anything better than that.”

Chewing Gum begins on E4 in early October

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