6/17/2023 0 Comments Nilufer i may destroy youHow does it feel for the show to exist, incidentally, in tandem with this conversation? I May Destroy You came out at the same time as Britain’s reckoning, again, with the long-standing issue of institutional racism in our country. I do think the questions are really interesting and I’m quite happy to let people talk about them and know what people’s potential answers to them are. How have you found the conversation since it aired?Ī lot of people are fucking up in that scene alone and it’s quite difficult to point the finger and say it’s that person’s fault or this person’s fault. There’s also the plot with Nilufer, the straight woman who Kwame sleeps with. That questioning propels him until he meets Tyrone and he’s offered something very different: to not hold on to control and maybe giving himself to someone else. Sex, and his use of apps to access it, becomes more of a crutch to him as we go through the latter episodes of the series, because he feels like he’s losing control. And he only brings it up again because he’s allowing himself to go to a point of introspection in regards to what happened to him. I kind of think he hasn’t really thought about that story of the men in the car until he brings it up again at the party. ![]() How do you navigate both celebrating and analysing queerness without losing one or the other? There’s no judgment of Kwame having casual sex, but there’s still a pervasive darkness to his gay experiences. As opposed to if, for example, a black kid from the ends got cast as James Bond and they’re speaking in an RP accent, the questions are all going to be about “Did you get a dialect coach?” That really feeds into conscious or unconscious biases of our expectations of actors who play parts. A white male actor can – and should – do anything and we expect them to be completely different from whoever they play. Is that a problem you’ve found in doing press? It feels like the immediate assumption is there’s some kind of marriage here between your experience and Kwame’s, which we wouldn’t assume of a white actor. It can feel weird as a journalist to talk to an actor from an underserved community about a fictional character from an underserved community. Just by chasing the truth it allows it to be specific to who he is. ![]() He’s not just a queer man, but a black queer man, and part of the reason why he’s so underserved by the officer he comes into contact with is because he’s queer, but also because he’s black. It really comes to the front when he comes into contact with the police. ![]() It was important it felt specific, however, and that was something that we kept in mind in creating Kwame. That’s a difficult question to answer because there’s no part of me that’s trying to figure out what it is to be black, for example. How do you balance exploring the universal gay experience but also the black gay experience? I May Destroy You felt radical in how it accepts the realities of gay life: nobody judges Kwame for using Grindr, for example.
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