Michaela Coel on Making “I May Destroy You”

The protagonist of “I May Destroy You,” a young woman named Arabella, has her drink spiked at a party and discovers afterward that she has been assaulted. She spends the rest of the show untangling what happened to her. And yet the HBO series is not a crime drama but a nuanced and sometimes comedic exploration of the emotional toll of surviving assault. The series—written and directed by, and starring, Michaela Coel—is based on Coel’s own experience. Coel tells Doreen St. Félix that she was assaulted while working on the second season of her celebrated BBC show “Chewing Gum.” She took notes about what happened, and some of that material made it into the new show, while other aspects are fictional. Of Arabella, who often wears a pink wig, Coel says, “You don't know where she begins and where I end.”