SEARCH AND DESTROY

2020 WAS A LOT. For you, for us, for Michaela Coel. So last August, she just needed to get out. Of her flat, of London. After deciding that she’d simply head wherever “they would let me go”, she took two (negative) COVID tests, booked a flight, landed in Iceland, quarantined for five days, hired a car, got in, Googled “beautiful places to see in Iceland”, and every other day would drive to a place, any place.

The months since March, the beginning days of lockdown, had been busy. Coel was still supervising the edit of the final episodes of I May Destroy You just as the very first episodes aired on the BBC. They’d always known the schedule would be tight, but then the pandemic hit and along with it a need to “recalibrate how we were going to do it” (which included actors in Italy doing ADR on their phones when the postal system couldn’t deliver mics).

While critics and audiences raved about what they were watching, the radical, remarkable TV playing out across screens, Coel had just one thought in her mind: “We have to finish it, we have to finish it. We’re not finished.” When she was finished, finally, what was left was TV unlike anything we’d ever seen.

Let’s go back to the beginning. You’ve spoken about your own assault, and how that was something you were working through.