#Who plays kwame in i may destroy you series#

Kwame is assaulted during a Grindr meet, and reports it to the police. He possesses a rich and complex inner life, something rarely afforded to gay men on screen, and even more rarely to queer characters of colour. In many ways Kwame, is a ground-breaking character.

Played with great compassion by Paapa Essiedu, Kwame is one of Arabella’s closest friends and the primary point of access for the show’s exploration of queer issues. It’s also blistering: the television equivalent of putting your hand on a hot plate in an act of ritual cleansing. It is sophisticated, intersectional and powerful in its study of rape culture, particularly through the prism of gender, race and class. What follows over the next eleven episodes is a complex and often painful dissection of sexual violence and the myriad ways it occurs. Towards the end of the first episode, the story takes an abrupt turn when Arabella is sexually assaulted by a stranger in a London bar after her drink is spiked with a sedative.

#Who plays kwame in i may destroy you series#

The series begins with Arabella, a young Black British woman (played by Coel) dodging deadlines for the delivery of the manuscript of her second book. But scrutiny is the burden of good work, and I May Destroy You has a major blindspot worth discussing. First released in June 2020, the show was quickly recognised as a profound and intelligent piece of cultural criticism. When a show succeeds in nearly every way it can often feel like a betrayal to identify its weaknesses, and this is certainly the case for Michaela Coel’s I May Destroy You.