While struggling to meet a deadline for her second book, she takes a break from work to meet up with friends on a night out in London. Premise Īrabella ( Michaela Coel) is a young Twitter-star-turned-novelist in her late twenties who found fame with her debut book Chronicles of a Fed-Up Millennial and is publicly celebrated as a Millennial icon. The series received nine nominations at the 73rd Primetime Emmy Awards, including Outstanding Limited or Anthology Series it won two awards including Outstanding Writing for Coel. Īccording to Metacritic, I May Destroy You was the most critically acclaimed television programme of 2020, and was described by The New York Times as "the perfect show for an anxious world." It won the BAFTAs for Best Mini-Series, Best Director: Drama, Best Writer: Drama and Best Actress, in addition to two RTS Programme Awards, two Independent Spirit Awards, a Gotham Award, a GLAAD Media Award, an NAACP Image Award and a Peabody Award. The series premiered on 7 June 2020 on HBO and on 8 June 2020 on BBC One. Coel stars as Arabella, a young writer in the public eye who seeks to rebuild her life after being raped. The series is set in London with a predominantly Black British cast. Kwame, thanks to Coel’s deft writing and Essiedu’s magnetic performance, helps to fill that void.I May Destroy You is a British black comedy-drama television limited series created, written, co-directed, and executive produced by Michaela Coel for BBC One and HBO. 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.
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