Michaela Coel hasn’t heard the term ‘nepo baby’. I get the sense that the multi-award winning actor, writer and director cloisters herself away from conversations like these, which cause a storm on social media but rarely have much real-world impact. She doesn’t, in fact, use social media, rarely gives interviews and has long been an advocate for ‘disappearing’ — as she said in her 2021 Emmy acceptance speech (she won the best writing award for I May Destroy You, the groundbreaking series she wrote, co-directed and starred in), “visibility these days seems to somehow equate to success. Do not be afraid to disappear…and see what comes to you in the silence.” Right now she is in Ghana, and enjoying more silence than she ever gets back home in London. “Coming to the village where my parents were born slows me down in a way that I think is beneficial for my mental health,” she explains. “Just living somewhere with less cityness, with fewer lights…”
We are talking about what it takes to get into the arts, which is how ‘nepo babies’ come up; the term is internet slang for the progeny of wealth and celebrity — people like Jaden Smith or Kaia Gerber, the supermodel daughter of Cindy Crawford (Gerber in particular has strained against the criticism that she, and others like her, have had an unfair leg up; “no artist is going to sacrifice their vision for someone’s kid,” she said last week. “That just isn’t how art is made…”).
