There’s a scene in the new BBC comedy Spent, in which the protagonist Mia, a down-on-her-luck former fashion model, is trying to land a new gig by impressing the CEO of a beauty brand. They get on well, have a few drinks, then she sees him fumbling around with a drunk teenage model before leading her to a private area of the club. Despite initially insisting to her friend that the girl is simply “letting her hair down after a long day of child labour. That’s what modelling is!” Mia becomes concerned and follows the girl to find her snorting cocaine behind a velvet curtain and throwing up on the slimy CEO’s shoes.
Michelle de Swarte, the writer, actress and stand-up comedian who wrote, created and stars as Mia in Spent, based the series on her own experience as a model in New York. “The amount of times I’d be out and see a girl really drunk and be like, ‘Are you all right? How old are you?’ One girl, she was 13, I asked where she lived and took her to her model apartment because I was worried about her. The next day I got a call from my agency to say, ‘We got a call from another agency — don’t do that because she’s not one of our girls.’ I was like, ‘I was looking after her, it wasn’t sinister!’ They said, ‘Please don’t interfere.’ That happened a few times.”
On another occasion de Swarte was on a job with a 13-year-old girl who was so hungry she fainted. “The team gave her some orange juice and carried on shooting.”
Predators and teen models are just one facet of Spent, a punchy, smart, sometimes serious and sometimes very funny six-part series that starts next week on BBC2. In the show, Mia becomes bankrupt in New York after splashing all her cash on thousand-dollar brunches and ludicrously expensive face mists. Broke and unemployed, she moves back to Brixton, sleeping on sofas, in cars and, eventually, a hostel, while maintaining to her friends and family that she’s still living the high life.
In reality de Swarte, 43, was never bankrupt — “I’ve never been in debt, I’ve never even had a credit card” — but did come back to the UK broke after living in New York for close to two decades. “I was terrible with money,” she tells me as we settle into a sofa in her publicity team’s office. “I moved to New York when I was 20 and modelled until my early thirties. I think my last job was at 35.” At this point, knowing there was a shelf life to being a successful model, she got into stand-up and, for a time, worked on the Canadian-American magazine Vice. “But I still spent like I made the same kind of money. I was still going to my same dermatologist where Botox and fillers were, like, three grand.”
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Back in London she threw herself into the stand-up circuit while practising writing for TV. She played her one-woman show at the Edinburgh Fringe and landed a part in Katherine Ryan’s Netflix comedy The Duchess. Ryan remains one of her closest friends — “She has done more for my career than any other human across the board,” de Swarte says. Spent was then commissioned by the BBC, which was looking for fresh voices.
• She became a top model. Now she’s exposing the industry’s dark side
Like Mia, de Swarte is a loud, proud, sweary and straight-to-the-point south Londoner with a bellowing cackle and no filter. She is outstanding company. “None of your f***ing business!” she roars when I ask if she’s single. “Yeah, I’m f***ing a couple of people. I’m pretty much single, babes. I’m bloody busy, you know what I mean?” She’s not on the apps. “My mate told me about Raya [the dating app for famous people]. I’m telling you, every black and brown person I know on Raya doesn’t get a swipe. I was on Raya for six months and I got one ‘like’.” She laughs. “It’s outrageous, isn’t it?” In Spent, Mia has a one-night stand with her ex-girlfriend and best friend, Jo. De Swarte is bisexual and, for a few years in her thirties, was married to a male skateboarder.
De Swarte grew up in Brixton where school didn’t suit her, so instead she started working, in shops, pubs and as a cleaner “in an office like we’re sitting in today”. At 19 she was scouted by a model agent and started getting booked for jobs. She soon moved to New York and for the next decade travelled the world, graced magazine covers, billboards and catwalks, and made serious money. She modelled for Dolce & Gabbana, Burberry and Missoni, and was shot by Mario Testino, Peter Lindbergh, Patrick Demarchelier and Steven Meisel. Her friends included the models Olivia Inge and Alek Wek — they are still close now. “We could go to any club, eat for free, drink for free, get invited to insane parties. It was like having the keys to the city, you could do whatever you wanted.”
She was signed to Karin Models, which at the time was run by Jean-Luc Brunel, a close associate of Jeffrey Epstein, who financed another of Brunel’s agencies, MC2 Model Management. De Swarte once found herself at Epstein’s house with a 15-year-old model friend in the early Noughties, an encounter she has retold in her stand-up. “I speak about it in stand-up, but I really thought about how I could do that not in a way that would be promoting myself at the expense of other people’s trauma,” she says. “And what’s addressed in Spent is just how vulnerable young women are.”
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Brunel was found dead in his French prison cell, a suspected suicide, in 2022 while awaiting trial on charges of raping a minor. He had also been accused of trafficking girls for Epstein. Allegations of sexual assault had surrounded him for decades. It’s the only time in our interview de Swarte speaks softly. Did you know at the time what he was involved in? “No, we didn’t know. None of us knew. You just had a feeling like, this seems weird. You do see it but you’re constantly going, ‘Are you seeing this?’ and everyone around you is reassuring you it’s normal. You’re like, this isn’t normal. It’s like, if you work with someone and that person is then outed as being very problematic in the workforce, and they’d given you a work assignment and you knew something didn’t feel good, didn’t feel safe, it’s like …” She pauses. “But at the time, what are you going to do? It’s not always necessarily one big thing but lots of little things, and [looking back on it] you can join all the dots together.”
Her time in New York sounds pretty wild. “I came out of it relatively unscathed,” she says. “I’ve had times [where I’ve been on] antidepressants, times when I thought I was losing my mind, had to be in therapy. It’s just part of life. I value my mental health, am happy with where I am now and I’m very grateful to be here.”
Spent starts tomorrow at 10pm on BBC2 and iPlayer
