Michaela Coel is surprisingly demure for a force of nature. She broke out of her down-at-heel east London estate to study acting at the Guildhall, write and star in a play about herself, Chewing Gum Dreams, at the National Theatre, adapt it into one of the best sitcom scripts on Channel 4 last year (as Chewing Gum), and has since acted in everything from the NT’s Medea to London Spy on BBC2. Coel is also a poet and a musician — she released an album in 2009 — so you’re kind of expecting Beyoncé Plus.
The woman waiting in an office at Channel 4, however, is shy, almost girlish, dressed in simple black and sipping a plastic cup of tap water.
She’s here because of The Aliens, the first starring role she didn’t write. It’s a dark comedy that crosses District 9 with The Sopranos and is set in an alternate reality where aliens crash-landed 40 years earlier. Though they look and act like humans, they are herded into a ghetto, working at menial jobs and shunned as dirty and stupid.
“We are in a great place for black women in the arts
Coel plays Lilyhot, apparently a webcam girl, but actually the sharpest mind on either side of the human/alien checkpoint, who uses Michael Socha’s half-alien border guard as a pawn in her subtle and unfathomable game. Coel delivers a restrained, menacing performance, slipping easily between manipulative charm and deadly scheming. For those who saw Chewing Gum, her autobiographical romp about growing up in Tower Hamlets, it’s evidence of her range, especially as the part was originally written for a blonde, blue-eyed Scandinavian.
“Here’s what tends to happen,” she says with a quick smile. “Usually, when a character is written as sassy or tough, they’ll open up the casting: ‘Oh, strong... That means we can invite some black people to the party.’ That’s why I wanted this job even more, because nobody was expecting me to get it.”
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We are talking shortly before the “diversity Oscars”, Chris Rock’s riffs still undelivered. She can understand the fuss. “We’re not in any movies — that’s why we’re not getting any Oscars,” she begins, then pauses. “I should say, I have never felt any barriers myself. I think we are in a great place in this country for black women in the arts. I’ve got no complaints about here, and I also get work in America.”
Certainly, black British women are making more films than ever before. In 2014, Amma Asante’s 18th-century drama Belle was an international box-office success, Destiny Ekaragha’s superbly observed comedy Gone Too Far won critical plaudits, and Second Coming, the screenwriting and directing debut of the playwright Debbie Tucker Green, had its UK premiere.
“I think there’s something a bit more palatable about black British people for Americans, which is why Steve McQueen was the guy who directed 12 Years a Slave,” Coel says. She acknowledges the social satire at the heart of The Aliens. “It’s an immigration riff,” she shrugs. “Having said that — as you see in Chewing Gum — when I was growing up, my race wasn’t a thing. There were black kids and white kids on my estate. We were all poor, but I didn’t even know that at the time.”
Brought up by her mum on estates in Hackney and Tower Hamlets, she wandered through life without much direction until her conversion to, then disillusionment with, the Pentecostal Church.
“If you’re from a West African background, you should know what you’re doing with your life,” she says. “I had no idea. I dropped out of college, people around me were getting pregnant or going to prison. Then this girl took me to church.”
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She had a genuine born-again moment when the pastor called people to the altar to accept God. “I ran up and fell on my knees, and I was crying my eyes out.” She chokes back tears, even now. “They gave me a Bible, they took me to a room and prayed over me. And that was the day I became a Christian.”
Her old friends dumped her — “They basically thought I’d gone crazy” — but a poet at her church encouraged her to write. She was soon touring churches, universities, the United States, even Wembley — “a terrible place to perform poetry”. She was spotted at a Hackney Empire gig and wound up at the Guildhall, where she found that the great gay friends she made didn’t chime with her homophobic version of Christianity.
“I was at church one day,” she remembers with evident pain. “The pastor said, ‘If you don’t stand up, you don’t believe,’ and I couldn’t stand up.”
Chewing Gum Dreams began as her graduation piece, was picked up by the Yard Theatre, in Hackney Wick, and transferred to the National, where Channel 4 scooped it up as a potential sitcom. “Tower Hamlets is poor, but I’d rather write about all the great stuff than the misery,” she says. “I wanted to make the estate a place where people would want to live. I loved my estate.”
If anything, her life has been about trying to rediscover the sense of community she felt there. On the set of The Aliens — filmed in Bulgaria — she hung out with Socha and the rest of cast, “as thick as thieves”. She bounces from project to project, finding warmth in each, but right now she’s writing season two of Chewing Gum, and “it’s just me, man, on my Jack Jones. Having been in Bulgaria with a gang of actors, it’s actually really lonely.” She almost chokes up again, turning her face to hide her tears, then zipping back with a laugh.
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“So Lilyhot is this smart, hard street player, right? You know the biggest direction line I kept on getting? Stop being so Michaela.” I wouldn’t stop now, I tell her. Being Michaela seems to be working out just fine.
The Aliens, E4, Tuesday at 9pm