Photograph: Rosaline Shahnavaz for the Guardian

by: Liv Little | Guardian

She turned her misfit years into the award-winning show Chewing Gum. Now Coel is starring in a major BBC drama – and challenging her industry to be better and braver

Michaela Coel: ‘The number one thing in self-care, for me, is not caring what people would think of you.’

In a series of videos uploaded to Twitter in late June, Michaela Coel sits in her bedroom amid a sea of wigs, hair creams, wig stands and preening products. She picks them up, wig after wig, bottle after bottle, and throws them with force into a black bin liner. She is done with spending hours perfectly positioning her hair, Coel tells the camera – not just the straight hair, but the curly “mixed race” hair, too, and any notion that she should look, act, think a certain way to be attractive.

When we meet a couple of weeks later, Coel tells me that act of rebellion against Eurocentric beauty standards feels final. Before, she would switch between wigs and a buzz cut, depending on her mood. Today her hair is shaved down to a No 2, and on the set of the gal-dem-Guardian cover shoot, she’s wondering aloud whether she needs to go shorter. The makeup artist and stylist are not sure, but when Coel sees my hair (a 0.5) she decides to go for it. She whips a pair of clippers from her bag as I offer to shave her head. This is therapy for black women, she later jokes.

As I shave her, I can tell that she’s feeling more herself. With the bone structure of a woman who was born to be bald, Coel tells me, “It’s so liberating – everyone has to do whatever they want in their lives.” She’s not throwing in the towel with all beauty products just yet, though; losing the wigs “also gives me more time to do my makeup. I’m still about it, you know?” Cardi B’s Invasion Of Privacy is playing in the studio and Coel moves in front of the camera, smizing effortlessly and mouthing every word to I Do.

Michaela Coel, 30, came to fame in 2015, when her creation Tracey Gordon made her first appearance on E4’s Chewing Gum. The comedy drama was bold and brash, but more importantly, it resonated with a generation of black women and girls who did not see themselves on screen. Tracey (written and played by Coel) is a childlike, highly religious twentysomething who embarks on a journey of self-discovery and sexual awakening, and who was partly inspired by Coel’s 14-year-old self. In the first episode, Tracey’s best friend, Candice, gives her a less than flattering Beyoncé makeover (think blue contact lenses, blond wigs, a push-up bra, luminescent pink lipstick), in a tragically funny bid to lure her gay, evangelical boyfriend into bed. “She’s a child,” Coel says now. “But then she’s not, obviously, because I can’t play a 14-year-old. She becomes very stunted in her adolescence. Maybe her naivety is something that I had even at the time of writing it. I’m still acting kiddish, which I don’t want to lose.”

People don’t know these jobs exist – especially when you go to schools like mine. These are not options

Chewing Gum went through 41 drafts before it reached TV screens, and had two previous incarnations. The first was as a 20-minute one-woman play during Coel’s last year at Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. Coel had taken herself out of the big end-of-year show, where the dresses and the characters didn’t quite fit, and Chewing Gum Dreams was born. “I was trying to be someone else and actually failing,” Coel says. “I could feel, ‘This isn’t good. I can do better than this.’ So I thought, ‘Let me, for once, tell my story.’ I started writing memories from secondary school and found I could formulate a story from that.” Inspired by her (unhappy) time at an all-girls Catholic school in London, she was then asked to write an extended, hour-long version (again playing all 11 characters) for the Yard theatre in east London. Coel canvassed her potential audience on the streets, offering free milkshakes in exchange for tickets: “‘If you buy this, meet me in Tinseltown and I’ll give you a milkshake.’ It was literally: roll your sleeves up – if you don’t do this, it won’t get done.”

Chewing Gum got its third and final incarnation on TV after it was commissioned by Channel 4’s chief creative officer, Jay Hunt, the sort of “risk” Coel wishes the industry would take more often. Since then she has won two Baftas (for best female comedian, and breakthrough talent), had a second series commissioned (there are rumours of a third, which she won’t confirm), and appeared in Star Wars: The Last Jedi as well as what was arguably the best episode of Black Mirror, USS Callister (Coel played an employee at a games company who ends up trapped in a special edition). In the US, Chewing Gum received rapturous reviews and Coel was nominated for several Black Reel awards; later this month she will give the keynote MacTaggart lecture at the Edinburgh television festival, becoming the youngest person to do so.

The multifaceted lives of black people, especially black women, are something we rarely see on television. Scrolling through old YouTube videos of Coel, I find one of her performing a poem to an audience in 2009, a parody of the roles that the mainstream media carves out. There’s the character who gets killed at the beginning of every American thriller; the Channel U video girl; and the black nurse in Holby City who gets two minutes of airtime. “I’ve been trying to get on an episode of The Bill since I was 13,” she says, “and as I watch the youths in my place, I sit and wail and vent, because I know I could have played Going To Jail better than any of you.” Here and elsewhere, Coel stresses the importance of having people of colour authoring the narratives, rather than simply turning up as talent.

There was a moment in the development of Chewing Gum, somewhere between the first and 41st drafts, she says, where a co-writer was almost brought in, and she cried. “I cried and I wasn’t sure why I cried, and I had to go around interviewing and picking a list of writers. Then, for some reason, Phil Clarke, the Channel 4 head of comedy, got a hold of my script and it was almost like he blew a whistle. Like, ‘Stop – she doesn’t need co-writers.’ I mean, the luck of the whole thing!” she says, grinning. Having space and freedom to tell your story is akin to therapy, Coel says. “Even unintentionally, someone with the best intentions cannot help their gaze. It’s very crucial. I’m very determined to bring more black women, women of colour, more working-class women into the writing room.”

‘The luck of the whole thing!’ Coel in Chewing Gum, the show that made her famous. Photograph: Mark Johnson/Channel 4

Coel grew up on an estate in Tower Hamlets, east London, with her mother and sister, surrounded by the cultures and characters who influenced Chewing Gum. She recalls how, after entering the world of performing arts, she would often find herself in rooms where she was the only person who looked like her, and start “sweating from every pore in my body. I think it’s that insecurity of being from a very working-class background, that anxiety: ‘I shouldn’t be here.’” She had grown up watching American shows, where the protagonists were people of colour, rather than British ones. “I was watching Moesha, Kenan And Kel, Girlfriends. But I also watched Seinfeld a lot.” Coel didn’t think working in media was a possibility for her, and if she could change one thing now, it would be raising awareness that jobs like hers are possible for marginalised voices. “People don’t know these jobs exist – especially when you go to schools like mine. These are not options. Being a writer is not a thing. But I would plant that seed in the head of every child, especially working-class children, women of colour, men of colour, the queer community.”