I May Destroy You, Michaela Coel’s no-holds-barred series about sexual assault and consent, costars Weruche Opia as Terry, the ride-or-die best friend to Coel’s shambolic Arabella. Terry spends a not-inconsequential amount of time reflecting on a threesome she once had; every time she turns the memory over in her mind, she uncovers new facets of that encounter.
Considering its significance to the character, a willingness to shoot the threesome scene was mandatory for any actor who wanted to play Terry. But Opia is a Christian, and doesn’t do sex scenes or nudity in her work—let alone sequences like this one, which is both sensual and explicit.
“I read it and see that it’s fairly graphic,” Opia recalled in a recent Zoom interview, laughing. There was no way she was going to do it. But Coel wanted Opia for the part—so she suggested hiring a body double to do the scene. Opia accepted, and the three of them, working with the show’s intimacy coordinator, Ita O’Brien, figured out how best to orchestrate the scene.
“You can imagine my joy when I got the role,” Opia said. “[It’s] perfect for me.”
I May Destroy You, which has aired in full on the BBC and is halfway through its 12-episode season in the U.S., where it airs on HBO, revolves around Coel’s Arabella—a writer who gets drugged and sexually assaulted, then goes on a mission to find her rapist and put her life back together. Coel is the writer, creator, and star of the series, and based its narrative on her own experience with sexual assault.
Arabella finds solace in her best friends, Kwame (Paapa Essiedu) and Terry. Where Kwame can be distant and aloof, off dealing with the aftermath of his own assault, Terry is present and unflappable, riding all the highs and lows of friendship. Sometimes that means flying to Italy to have a drug-fueled bacchanal with Arabella; at other times, it means tenderly tucking Arabella into bed and helping her wrap her hair after the assault. The depth of their friendship is summed up in their heavy metal motto: “Your birth is my birth; your death is my death.”
“Honestly, Michaela, these one-liners!” Opia exclaims. “I don’t know where she gets them. I’m living for them.”
Like Arabella and Terry, Opia and Coel have a shared history. They first met in 2013, on the set of the hit British drama Top Boy. Opia, a Nigerian-born actor who moved to the U.K. as a teen, played Nafisa in the series, marking her first recurring TV role. The duo didn’t become friends back then, but Opia remembered Coel years later when she went in for her I May Destroy You audition.
“She didn’t remember that we met before, which is fine,” Opia said sarcastically. “But instantly, we got on. We went from fake friends to real friends.”
Terry is perhaps Opia’s most high-profile role to date, though she’s also notched turns in Nollywood projects and BBC shows like Bad Education. Playing the part also let Opia fulfill her meta career goal of portraying an actor onscreen. Terry is less established than Opia: She’s still struggling to land a gig, going out for awkward commercial auditions and batting away bouts of stage fright. “I was definitely able to relate to Terry—where she was in her career, the struggling, trying to get over the issues of self-confidence, the microaggressions,” Opia said. Coel included nods to Opia’s real life in Terry’s scenes, making sure, for instance, that a scene in which Terry auditions for a commercial takes place in a room inspired by one Opia once auditioned in. “I walked in on the day was shooting it and it was like, Whoa,” Opia recalled. “Taking me back.”