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Daily Mirror
Daily Mirror
Entertainment
Graeme Culliford

I May Destroy You star Michaela Coel's £3million fortune as Netflix gamble pays off

Actress Michaela Coel grew up on a council estate in the heart of London’s financial district... but now it seems SHE has a licence to print money.

The Londoner has raked in £3.3million since writing and starring in the gritty 2020 HBO/BBC1 drama, I May Destroy You.

Michaela, 34, had previously turned down a £750,00 offer from Netflix for the show because it meant signing over the copyright – but the gamble has paid off handsomely.

Michaela’s first accounts for her company Falkna Ltd show she paid £766,593 to creditors last year. But that still left her with net assets of over £2.6million, according to records filed last week at Companies House.

As teen in E4 show Chewing Gum (Channel 4)

It’s a long way from her tough childhood on a council estate in London, where Michaela and her sister Jasmine, 36, were raised by their Ghanaian-born mum Marion, 54.

In a speech at the Edinburgh TV Festival in 2020, Michaela said: “Between skyscrapers and medieval alleyways exists a social housing estate, there in plain sight yet somehow unseen.

“It was built in 1977 with the aim of helping homeless people and that is my proud home.

Michaela in I May Destroy You (Press Association Images)

“At most, we were one of four black families there, which I didn’t know anyone cared about until someone left a pile of s**t on our doorstep. My mum silently cleaned it up. But when we received a bag of s**t through the letterbox, I had no choice but to take things into my seven-year-old hands.

“I walked around the estate, I swung on the swings, desperate for transparency, wondering who the enemies of my family were.” Michaela drew upon experiences like that for her BAFTA-winning E4 show Chewing Gum, about a teenage girl growing up on a council estate. She has also starred in two TV series – Black Mirror and The Aliens.

But the Emmy-winning I May Destroy You, about a rape survivor, literally transformed her fortunes. Michaela began pitching the show in 2017 and Netflix offered £750,000 for full rights. But Michaela refused, insisting she should retain copyright.

She recalled: “There was just silence on the phone. She said, ‘It’s not how we do things here. Nobody does that, it’s not a big deal’. I said, ‘If it’s not a big deal, then I’d really like to have 5% of my rights’.”

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