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.
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.
“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’.”
