While she’s appeared on a couple of British series that are available to stream all over the world, like Top Boy and Bad Education, I May Destroy You is likely going to the show that introduces Opia to American audiences. I wasn’t sure I was going to until I had graduated from university and found a part-time drama school in London,” she said. “All through my childhood, teenage, university years, I studied drama and sociology. Opia’s first memory of performing was when she was five or six years old-she recruited her cousin and sister to perform “Humpty Dumpty” for her mom. I was at an impressionable age at 13, so I forced myself to make the transition.” After moving to the U.K., I got to learn this notion of being a Black person in the Diaspora. When I lived in Nigeria, I had friends from all over the world. I found that people tended to stay in communities. “I didn’t really understand the concept of being a Black person, coming from Nigeria where the majority are Black. But she was in for a bit of a culture shock. Having traveled to London nearly every summer for vacation, Opia thought she knew what life would be like. She attended an international school there until she moved to London at the age of 13. He gets so excited when I talk to him about my stuff, I’m like, ‘Alright, you gotta live through me, bruh!’” she laughed). Opia was born in Nigeria, to a news broadcaster mother (“She actually started off as an actor, and then journalism stole her away,” the actress joked) and a professor father (“I know he lowkey wishes he was an actor. On a phone call from London, Opia reflected that exuberance, punctuating our conversation about her experience on I May Destroy You with genuine laughter. Terry, an aspiring actress with a keen sense of style, brings levity to a story that, at times, might otherwise feel too heavy to digest. I remember leaving and I was like, what the hell was that? It felt like an amazing date that I’d just been on.” “We did the scene and there was this electricity. “I remember her staring at me, and I was like, ‘Okay…’,” she laughed. It wasn’t until Opia’s third audition for I May Destroy You that the two met again. They had only briefly met once before auditioning for I May Destroy You, when they both appeared in the same episode of season two of Top Boy, the popular East London-based crime series on Netflix and Channel 4. The palpable chemistry between Arabella and Terry, two best friends who seem destined to be in each other’s lives forever (“Your birth is my birth, your death is my death” is a common refrain uttered between the two throughout the series) is just as real off-camera between Coel and Opia. She believes that in order to help Arabella cope with the trauma of her rape, she needs a supportive team by her side. As Arabella’s best friend, Terry seeks to “affirm” her, as she says to their other best friend Kwame, a gay fitness instructor with a penchant for swiping through Grindr throughout the day. With the help of her two best friends, Kwame (Paapa Essiedu) and Terry (Weruche Opia), Arabella spends the remaining 11 episodes piecing together the details of the night she was raped. It’s not until the end of the first episode, when she wakes up in front of her computer, that she realizes she also has a memory of being sexually assaulted the night before. The series focuses on a young writer named Arabella who, while working on the draft of her second book, takes a break to hit the pubs one night and wakes up with a cracked phone, a cut on her head, and a vague memory of an ATM. I May Destroy You is a nuanced portrayal of the ways in which people choose sides when intersections of race, ethnicity, and class are tossed into the mix of understanding trauma and assault. By now, you might have already caught wind that if you watch just one new television series this summer, it should be I May Destroy You, Michaela Coel’s dark drama inspired by her own real-life experience with sexual assault.
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