FIRST DAY ON EARTH Star Michaela Coel Covers HARPER’S BAZAAR’s March 2026 Issue

Pin

Michaela Coel covers HARPER’S BAZAAR’s March 2026 issue, on newsstands March 3. In an exclusive interview with Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff, Coel, who is making her long-anticipated return to television with FIRST DAY ON EARTH, a 10-episode series she wrote and will star in, opens up about past and pending projects and the spiritual force guiding her writing process: “I am a vessel,” Coel says. “I’m working for it. And it is sometimes beautiful, it is sometimes brutal, sometimes aggressive, uncompromising, demanding, intimate, mysterious, beautiful, intriguing, soulful,” she says. “It’s so many things, and it’s a crazy relationship.”

Pin

Pin

On embodying her character, Sam Anslem, a fanatical fashion designer, in Mother Mary: “I ate her soul. I swallowed it whole,” she says. “It tasted so powerful and so sad and also crunchy.”

On working opposite Anne Hathaway in Mother Mary: “I had never seen or met Anne in my life. We met to read the script, and it was just a mess. Like, a mess of just intensity,” Coel says. “I like to play and tease my scene partners and just try and keep them on their toes.” Later, in a WhatsApp message, she writes that she “really loved dancing with Anne” and feels “love and empathy” toward her.

On her performance in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever: “I actually felt like I wasn’t at the place where I was good enough to handle the green screen,” she says.

On feeling unfulfilled in between filming for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever: She was stationed in Atlanta for the nine-month shoot, even though she had relatively little screen time. “So that means, like, I’m outside, I’m in the club. You know what I’m saying? Like, I’m in the club,” she says. She was meeting rappers and their entourages, partying. It was fun, but she felt she wasn’t fulfilling her purpose. “It was adrift from what I was supposed to be doing, and that made me feel a bit low,” she says.

On the emotional cost of her work: “There’s a ruthlessness to this stuff. Like I said, I’m aggressively in pursuit of the truth, and that can be very tough.”

On how her creative ambitions impact her relationships: “It’s like when you move out of a house for a couple of weeks, but all your stuff’s there. So, you know, the person’s coming back,” she explains. “But if you are an anxious person, you will freak out and worry that I have eloped.”

On reviewing the script for The Christophers with co-star Ian McKellen prior to filming: “He shared everything that was going on in his brain. And for me, I very rarely do that, because my assumption is that the writer has done 365 drafts,” she says. (Famously, Coel wrote almost 200 drafts of I May Destroy You.) “I learned that the writer welcomes questions. And so we did that for a week.”

[Photo Credit: Willy Vanderperre for Harper’s Bazaar Magazine]

• Editorials
• Harper’s Bazaar
• Magazines
• Michaela Coel
• Willy Vanderperre