'I feel joy': how Bisha K Ali went from struggling standup to Marvel maestro

She was living on beans. Now she’s in LA writing Ms Marvel, the eagerly awaited TV series starring MCU’s first Muslim superhero. The writer talks about joyriding premiers and how to silence trolls

Before she became a Marvel screenwriter, Bisha K Ali was just another British standup struggling to get a gig. Before that, she was a domestic violence support worker, and before that a data scientist. And for almost all of that time, she was also completely broke – so broke, in fact, that in 2017 Ali found herself being offered an extortionate amount of money to make a Christmas card for Deborah Frances White, host of The Guilty Feminist podcast.

“Bless her,” says Ali with a laugh, thinking back to the time when she would regularly appear on the show with White. “She knew I couldn’t afford my root canal work and she was like, ‘Do you want to make a Christmas card for me and I will pay you exactly how much your root canal costs?’ And I was like, ‘Yes, Deborah, I will do that.’” Ali had just moved to Manchester to live with friends because she could no longer afford to live in London. She was living on tins of beans and contemplating selling her sofa to pay the rent.

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from The Guardian https://ift.tt/35yVSA4