![]() ![]() Played by Paapa Essiedu and Weruche Opia, fitness instructor Kwame and aspiring actress Terry help form the foundation of I May Destroy You. Get on the Michaela Coel Bandwagon While There’s Still Room The show’s focus expands in kind: Arabella remains the center, but she’s supported and paralleled by her two closest friends, who both have disturbing encounters of their own. I May Destroy You quickly widens out from the immediate aftermath of Arabella’s assault into its long-term aftermath, even flashing back to the months and years before that give the event its context. And, of course, she plays the lead role: Arabella, an up-and-coming writer who, in a harrowing scene drawn from Coel’s own experience, is drugged and sexually assaulted the night before a deadline.īut, much like Arabella herself, Coel couldn’t do it alone. In addition to penning every script sans writers room, Coel codirected most episodes and serves as executive producer. Which makes sense: After a demoralizing experience on her first marquee project, Chewing Gum-for which she only got credit as a coproducer in the second season-Coel took full control over her follow-up. Kwame, thanks to Coel’s deft writing and Essiedu’s magnetic performance, helps to fill that void.Halfway through its 12-episode first season, the rapturous acclaim for I May Destroy You has been largely attributed to its British auteur Michaela Coel. In a just world more projects like Moonlight would have followed in its wake. ![]() “It’s an incredibly radical and beautiful piece of work,” he said after lamenting that the film is forever linked to that Oscar ceremony’s best-picture mix-up. The actor considers Moonlight, Barry Jenkins’s dreamlike, Oscar-winning 2016 drama about a young gay Black boy in Miami, a creative touchstone in this space-though it wasn’t necessarily something he drew from while crafting Kwame. “We’re still very, very, very early in the journey toward accurately representing that world,” he said firmly. “For Black gay men the ambiguity of sexual assault and our willingness to report it are complicated by our race, gender, and sexuality.”įor Essiedu this role is a drop in the bucket of vastly overdue representation. “Kwame is crucial for voyaging into the unchartered waters of sexual violence against gay men,” Jason Okundaye wrote recently in Dazed. His narrative also highlights the real issues gay Black men face when they try to report sex crimes. On the bus, at the grocery store with his grandmother-it’s all the same for him. Along the way she’s supported by best friends Terry ( Weruche Opia), a ride-or-die struggling actor, and Kwame, a fitness instructor who spends his downtime swiping right on hookup apps. While out with friends one night, her drink is spiked and she’s sexually assaulted-an attack that upends her life, sending her careening toward self-destruction that she frequently masks as self-care. ![]() I May Destroy You, which airs on HBO in the U.S., revolves around Arabella (Coel), a London writer trying to finish her second book. “That became a far more interesting route for me-what he doesn’t say rather than what he does say,” Essiedu said. He and Coel, whom he first met and befriended at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, recalibrated the part, changing Kwame into a more layered character who constantly suppresses his thoughts and feelings. “He was way louder and bigger, more in your face,” Essiedu recalled in a recent Zoom interview. He’s ultra chill by design-though the original iteration of the character that Coel wrote, Essiedu said, took a much different path. Kwame spends most of his time loping from one hookup to the next, creating a daisy chain of pleasure. There’s a quiet ease to the way Paapa Essiedu plays Kwame in I May Destroy You, Michaela Coel’s staggering BBC series about sexual assault and consent. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |