Misfits: A Personal Manifesto by Michaela Coel

Author:Michaela Coel [Coel, Michaela]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473596399
Google: GusoEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2021-09-06T23:00:00+00:00

My show went up, and the audience went up with me, on my wings; responding, understanding, laughing and crying in every place I hoped they would. People came, who looked at things the way I did and saw they didn’t fit; some felt they’d spent most of their lives being judged and disempowered before even speaking. The misfits were inspired—to create.

So I continued speaking. As an actor, at the National Theatre, I remained there for a year playing and bonding in various plays. I even had a four-day run of Chewing Gum Dreams at The Shed; a temporary theatre. It was great. Many more misfits came.

The play was read by a production company that sat under the umbrella of a huge production company. They asked if I wanted to make a TV show. “Yes of course holy shit yes.”

They suggested I omit “Dreams” from the title. I said, “Yes of course holy shit sure.” First, I was to write and read a twenty-minute version of what I imagined the TV show to look like and invite a small audience for a channel who were interested. I was then asked to write three five-minute scenes of TV to be uploaded onto the internet; those were the first attempts at scenes I’d ever written for TV. I had no practice; obviously, I was an outsider.

Yes, outsider. Not in a bad way, I wasn’t out in the rain. I just wasn’t here. When people mention “diversity” I can guess we mean people who aren’t watching or making much of our telly, creatives “outside of” this industry. I can’t use the word “diversity,” because really I couldn’t get clarity on it. I can’t use “outsider” because the in/out thing becomes reminiscent of Brexit. So I’m gonna take on another existing word—“misfit”—and change the meaning of it just for this lecture.

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