Michaela the DESTROYER

How a young talent from East London went from open-mic nights to making the most sublimely unsettling show of the year.

- By E. Alex Jung / Photograph by Ruth Ossai

Michaela Coel is not a Christian anymore, but the spirit has never left her. The Bible is the reason she started writing. Her first poem, “Beautiful,” was inspired by Psalm 139, and it’s still as clear as crystal. “I am fearfully and wonderfully made,” she recites. When she writes, she gets the same feeling she did one Sunday when she was 18 years old and her hand shot into the air during the altar call. She ran to the pulpit, tears streaming down her face, ready to accept Jesus Christ as her personal lord and savior. She cries and cries and cries as she writes because it all feels so big—the pain, the ecstasy—and whether you call that thing God or the cosmos or simply inspiration she isn’t sure, but she knows it is holy and precious. “I can’t name what that is, because I’m never going to know,” she says. “I open myself up as a vessel for the story to come through.”

She writes until there is no time left to write. “I go up into a mountain, and I come back with 12 containers of vomit and these are the episodes,” she says. “My team acts as if it’s a great takeaway, like, ‘Wow, this food is really interesting! What are these aromas? What’s here?’ ” She takes notes and retreats to another secluded area—often the vacant pied-à-terre of a wealthy benefactor—where she’ll write and cry and expel her guts again. She wrote 191 drafts of