Washington Post — It feels right that Jodie Comer became famous playing an assassin. Because her acting instincts are killer.
www.jodie-comer.org
- The BikeRiders Screencaps
- Jodie Comer & Austin Butler on The Kelly Clarkson Show
- “The Bikeriders” Austin Butler And Jodie Comer Talk Learning Lines, Guilty Pleasures, And Red Flags
- “Oh, Jodie”: When Jodie Comer Met Jodie Foster
- Photoshoots Update: Modern Weekly China & Elle UK
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Posted by admin on June 22, 2024
In The Bikeriders, a movie pumped up with ostentatious displays of masculinity, it’s Jodie Comer who steals the show. As Kathy, wife to Austin Butler’s character Benny, the Liverpool native transforms into a pugnacious Midwesterner who brings pathos and vulnerability to the real-life story about a ’60s-era motorcycle club and the men who’d die for it. It’s further proof that the former Killing Eve star is an actor without limits. One person amazed by Comer’s skills is Jodie Foster, who got on a call with her name-twin to talk about emotional triggers, film-set politics, and theatrical trauma.
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FRIDAY 1 PM APRIL 12, 2024 LONDON
JODIE COMER: Hi Jodie, how’s it going?
JODIE FOSTER: Good, Jodie! I’m so excited.
COMER: Thank you for taking the time to do this. I’m so appreciative.
FOSTER: I got to see The Bikeriders last night, so that was fun.
COMER: Oh, brilliant. So it’s fresh?
FOSTER: Totally fresh. We’ll get into that, but first and most importantly, how did your mom come up with your name? I need to know.
COMER: [Laughs] My mom said that Jodie was always clear to her. If I was going to be a boy, I’d be Kieran, but I ended up being a girl.
FOSTER: The spelling is really uncommon. I think my mom decided she invented the spelling. She said if you put an “e” at the end, it would be the girl’s version.
COMER: It’s true. I haven’t met a lot of Jodies.
FOSTER: I really loved watching The Bikeriders, and it amazes me that you’re able to transform so completely. I don’t know how you do it!
COMER: Thank you. I had an initial conversation with Jeff [Nichols, the director] on Zoom, and he sent the script over, and I was aware that it was based on a book of photographs by Danny Lyon. There were a couple of images of this woman Kathy, and then he was like, “Just so you know, I have 30 minutes of audio of her.” I was like, “Why is this not in my inbox?” It was in that moment, listening to the clip, where I felt like I had an insight as to who this woman was. I could hear the way she carried herself through the way she spoke, and that ignited my imagination.
FOSTER: I don’t want to read into the patterns of your work, but because I’m so old, I’m able to look back on roles that I chose and say, “Now I see why I did that.” It occurred to me as I was looking through your stuff, between The Last Duel, Prima Facie, and even Free Guy, that you’ve told stories about men’s toxicity, and how the women were dramatically affected by that and having their own identities, and possibly by virtue of being close to them, surviving it.
COMER: I think you’re right. I’m realizing that I have a revelation after I’ve finished a job of becoming aware of what it gifted me on a personal level, or maybe something I was wanting to unearth within myself, that I mightn’t have been super conscious of. The beauty of those characters is that they are—I don’t know, I hate that term “strong female character.” What I enjoyed about them was, they had strength, but they were also given space to be vulnerable. But what ultimately connected me to those roles is, they trigger an emotion in me. They rile me up.
FOSTER: Hopefully you get to the end of the movie or show and you say, “Because I went through this, somehow I’m a fuller or better person. And hopefully by refraction, the people that explore this thing with me, the audience members, maybe they get to be better people too.” I guess that’s what the hope is.
COMER: Yeah.
Posted by admin on June 19, 2024
Jodie has been featured in two shoots this Month ahead of Bikeriders Press! Photos from the amazing shoots have been added to our gallery, enjoy! Apologies for the wait.
Posted by admin on February 21, 2024
For our 30th annual Hollywood Issue, we’ve chosen 11 vibrant, wildly different stars seizing this moment. We gathered them together over two sunny January days in Los Angeles, under the direction of photographer and filmmaker Gordon von Steiner, to talk about everything from their first auditions to their most unforgettable lines—and, of course, to create this year’s VF Hollywood cover, an homage to our first foray into the form three decades ago.
The uncertainties, of course, can’t be denied: The entertainment industry just emerged from the most profound work stoppage in its history. Audiences are splintering, bottom-line priorities are intensifying, and there are still existential questions about the future even as cameras start rolling again. But if movies as surprising and visionary as Barbie and Oppenheimer can smash box office records even as Marvel and DC franchises nose-dive, it’s clearly time to shake things up.
For our 30th annual Hollywood Issue, we’ve chosen 11 vibrant, wildly different stars seizing this moment. We gathered them together over two sunny January days in Los Angeles, under the direction of photographer and filmmaker Gordon von Steiner, to talk about everything from their first auditions to their most unforgettable lines—and, of course, to create this year’s VF Hollywood cover, an homage to our first foray into the form three decades ago.
The uncertainties, of course, can’t be denied: The entertainment industry just emerged from the most profound work stoppage in its history. Audiences are splintering, bottom-line priorities are intensifying, and there are still existential questions about the future even as cameras start rolling again. But if movies as surprising and visionary as Barbie and Oppenheimer can smash box office records even as Marvel and DC franchises nose-dive, it’s clearly time to shake things up.
And you’ll see a new generation rising, with bright talents like The Bikeriders’ Jodie Comer, Saltburn’s Barry Keoghan, and Wednesday’s Jenna Ortega imbuing complex roles with extraordinary humanity.
Some of the actors here were primed for a whirlwind before everything abruptly went quiet with the actors and writers strikes.
Ortega, who will star in Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice sequel this fall, says Wednesday’s record-breaking Netflix launch, which closed out 2022, had been dizzying. “I didn’t know what to say or do,” she says. “I just became very confused emotionally.” The break imposed by the strike helped her remember why she’s been acting full tilt since she was nine: “To still enjoy the job just as much 12 years later—having seen all of the ugly and wonderful and extreme—is pretty cool.”
Others couldn’t slow down at all. Because Greta Lee’s Oscar-nominated movie, Past Lives, was an independent production, she had the mixed blessing of being allowed to do promotion for a year straight: “That’s why I feel like a corpse woman who’s ready to lie down and crawl into either a cheeseburger or bowl of spaghetti.”
But like many of her peers here, Lee spent years navigating narrow-minded business models, so she knows this moment matters. “For myself and for other Asian American women, I don’t want to accept my previous reality—I can’t,” she says. “I have to make up for lost time.”
Randolph, meanwhile, may well take home an Oscar on March 10 for her work in The Holdovers after making a name for herself on the New York stage. “When you truly understand the climate of this industry and who’s telling the stories, we’re marginalized. And then on top of that, to be a woman of color who is curvy?” she says. “This outdoes the dreams that I dreamt…. I let go of the wheel in that respect a long time ago.”
Lily Gladstone, an Oscar nominee this year for Killers of the Flower Moon, was raised on the Blackfeet Reservation in northwestern Montana, and came up fighting for a paltry selection of Indigenous parts in film and television. “You kick the door down to hold it open,” she says. She’s now the face of progress and could become the first Native American performer to ever win best actress. “I advocate for other people before I advocate for myself,” she says. “Even just making dinner reservations, I count the whole party and I forget myself.”
On a hazy winter afternoon, Charles Melton paces on his deck in the Silver Lake hills. He’s demonstrating exactly how, and where, he developed the physicality of his character, Joe, in May December, which has vaulted the Riverdale alum from teen-soap idol to art house heartthrob.
Between sips of Coke Zero, Melton gazes out at the panoramic view of the Los Angeles skyline. “I’ve always been a big dreamer, and I’ve tried not to set any limits in my mind because I’ll get caught up in the limits outside of me,” he says. “I’m always seeking. My ambition is always driving me.”
He can’t say what’s next, after so many prizes and nominations. But Melton has come out of May December focused and reoriented. He’s ready to take the town in his hands—and you hear that a lot from this group. “There’s been this democratization of creativity where gatekeepers have been demoted and everyone can make things,” says Portman.
Audiences are already reaping the rewards. —David Canfield
Meet the Stars of the 2024 Hollywood Portfolio
The British actor is only 30 and already halfway to an EGOT, but she swears she’s not following a playbook: “I am just following my gut.”
Posted by admin on November 16, 2023
Proud Northerner Jodie Comer is the most radiant – and relatable – young star in Britain’s acting firmament. Photographed by Tim Walker, styled by Edward Enninful
Just take her reflections on teenage nights out (“six-inch heels, dress, no coat”), her WhatsApp group with her closest mates (“fire, 24 hours a day, seven days a week”), and her early attempts at a beauty routine (“I used to wash my face with a baby wipe!”) All of which will be deeply familiar to millennial women in the UK, most of whom also had Saturday jobs and frequented suburban nightclubs and slept in their make-up. Perhaps it’s part of the reason why the nation has taken this particular homegrown talent so firmly to its heart – Jodie, we imagine, is just like us.
Posted by admin on November 06, 2023
It’s fair to say that Jodie Comer can do no wrong, whether it’s on stage, on screen or on the red carpet. Proving the point yet again, the actor stepped out at the LACMA Art + Film Gala in LA over the weekend, wearing a look that can only be described as a masterclass in the art of the smoky eye.
Focused around a palette of hazy browns – specifically Tom Ford’s Eyeshadow Quad in Mink Mirage, according to Comer’s make-up artist Georgie Eisdell – the mocha-toned mix added subtle drama to Jodie’s face without feeling too heavy. To recreate the same effect, use your darkest shade along your lash line to add intensity, then gently smudge it out over lids and brow bones incorporating the lighter colours with a soft blending brush as you go. To add extra definition, the actor’s lashes were coated in YSL’s inky black Faux Cils Mascara to anchor the smokiness.
Comer wore her smoky eye on the red carpet, but happily for the rest of us, the look is the perfect way to segue from the office to after-dark activities. Although it’s resolutely smoky, the lack of sparkle in the shadows means it doesn’t veer into “Christmas party” territory, nor does it feel too full-on for a quick drink after work. To make it work on you as well as it does on her, take Comer’s lead and pair with sparkling skin (hers comes courtesy of Noble Panacea’s Brilliant Glow Hydration Oil) and blusher with an almost toffee undertone, to tie all the tones together.
Posted by admin on June 05, 2023
Each year we photograph Tony nominees, and talk with them about their craft. This year we focused on actors.
“Everyone always said theater was incomparable, like there was nothing like it, and I never understood what they meant. When you’re in a room of that many people all experiencing something at the same time, the energy is electrifying, and that has been one of the greatest joys about this experience. It’s intoxicating.” — Jodie Comer
Posted by admin on April 28, 2023
The star of ‘Killing Eve’ and Broadway’s acclaimed ‘Prima Facie’ talks about the challenges and epiphanies of a theater debut.
But by that time she was also Emmy winner Jodie Comer, earner of die-hard fans for “Killing Eve,” the 2018 BBC series that made her a bona fide sensation. Her portrayal of Villanelle, a coolheaded Russian psychopath, not only made her bankable, it also delivered an accent that was convincing enough to bamboozle Suzie Miller, “Prima Facie’s” author.
“When we came up with Jodie, Suzie was like, ‘We can’t employ her. She’s Russian,’” recalled the play’s director, Justin Martin. “And I was like, ‘She’s not Russian. She’s English!’”
It was through this singular set of circumstances that Comer — sans the validating credentials from RADA or Lamda or Central School of Drama — came to make her stage debut in Miller’s one-person play about Tessa, an overachieving London barrister. Tessa proudly trumpets the cases she’s won for her clients, men accused of sexual assault. Then “Prima Facie” makes its own sordid case clear when the justice tables turn on her.
The role is a daunting launchpad for a theater neophyte, an intense and grueling 100-minute test of concentration and stamina. After the play was announced, Martin took Comer to the Harold Pinter Theatre in London’s West End so she could stand on the empty stage and get a feel for the 796-seat house. The experience probably should have freaked her out a bit. It didn’t.
“I mean, I was awestruck, but I wasn’t intimidated,” Comer said. “Yeah, I wasn’t. I think Justin, what he was expecting maybe was for me to get to that moment and go, ‘Oh, God!’”
Where she did go was straight to work, but not without taking up Martin and producer James Bierman on their offers for help.
Actors who’ve achieved renown can grow leery of taking on a new play. I spoke recently with a director who ticked off the names of actors known for intelligence and success crossing over into movies — none of whom were eager to risk being in a new play. A work in its freshman viewing places a sizable burden on a star. There’s no reliable road map, and so with the uncharted choices the production makes, performers may worry they will be held responsible for road bumps.
Comer, who had some film and TV experience before “Killing Eve,” didn’t count on an actor’s life growing up, though her talents were noticed. “It seems pretty clear I was a very confident child, you know, very silly,” she said. “Always putting on like shows or impressions.” In school, she said, the reports were, “I was very chatty. It was always, you know, ‘Chats too much. Social, yeah, needs to focus a little bit more, less talking.’”
When she was about 12, she performed a monologue in school, and that led to a role in a radio play. Her parents — a physiotherapist father and a mother who worked at a transport company in Liverpool — never stood in her way. But the way wasn’t paved for her. She has pointed out in award acceptance speeches that she didn’t have the advantage of conservatory training, and as Martin put it, “There’s a mania for that” in the theater world.
“Prima Facie,” too, had some prior success, having been performed in Miller’s native Australia before London, although neither the play nor the playwright were well known outside her home turf. A human rights lawyer by training, with 15 years in criminal law, Miller said that she found herself perplexed when she studied sexual assault in law school.
“I remember thinking when it came to sexual assault, there was something amiss,” she said in an interview in the lower lobby of the Golden Theatre on West 45th Street, where “Prima Facie” had its official opening last week. “And I thought: The defense is always, ‘There was consent. I believe there was consent.’ Right. So what — they just have to believe it’s there? And you can do anything you like?”
Miller has written several plays, but “Prima Facie,” which premiered in Sydney in 2019, has struck a particularly resonant chord. “It’s just been translated into nearly 30 languages,” she recounted. “It’s been done in China. It’s being done in Japan. It’s astonishing. Turkey! A place where they said, ‘We really have to have this on.’
“And the great thing for me that’s happened: thousands and thousands of messages from women telling me their story, which you know, like sometimes it’s hard to read them. I just think, ‘How do you go out in the world and think the world is a safe place?’”
Tessa’s background was changed for “Prima Facie” in London, where the character’s origins became Liverpool — the same as Comer’s. “She was also present in the rehearsal process,” Comer said of Miller. “I don’t know if that is necessarily usual, but she made sure she was there I think because everything was very new to me, and she wanted me to feel like I was supported.”
Comer and her director got the production up on its feet simply by getting up on their own.
“What we didn’t do is stand around and talk about a lot. We just got up and we did it,” said Martin, describing Comer as intuitively gifted and eager to learn. “She’s very honest about what she knows and doesn’t know. She will stand up for things that she thinks are important. But she’s always collaborative.”
Comer — who flew back to London earlier this month to receive the Olivier Award, the West End’s equivalent of a Tony, for her performance as Tessa — said she approached the experience with a student’s thirst for knowledge. “I knew when I was going into this, I was like, ‘I am going to grow so much,’” she said. “I don’t know how, but I know that this is going to stretch me in a way that I’ve never been challenged before.”
So unaccustomed was she to the ways of the stage that Martin had to walk her through the ritual of acknowledging the audience’s applause.
“I said, ‘Now we are going to do the bows,’ and she came up to me and she said, ‘I didn’t know — How do we do that?’” Martin recalled. “I was like, ‘What do you mean?’ And I just took her hand and we stood up there and we bowed together.”
Watching Comer in “Killing Eve” and, in a very different vein, her performance in the 2021 BBC film “Help” about caregivers in Liverpool, you’re jarred by the idea of the actress needing instruction on how to perform a curtain call. Especially as she confesses to having been an extrovert all her life.
Miller’s play so called out to her that she carved out time for “Prima Facie,” even though she had to say no to big film projects such as Ridley Scott’s “Napoleon.” “It was always very clear that the play was what was right for me,” she said. “And I think there were a few people who thought I was insane.”
She went with her gut, though, and perhaps the validation is the audience’s nightly response. “From a soul perspective and what I actually believe in, it was clear,” she said of the decision to pivot to the stage — and to Tessa. “It’s like, no, I know this, I feel it in my body.”
Comer sometimes feels the impact on the street, too — the ubiquity of Tessa’s tragedy.
“This woman walked past me,” she recalled, “and then she came back around the corner. And she said, ‘I’ve seen the play, and you know, I really enjoyed it, it was incredible. Thank you so much.’ And there was something in the way that she looked at me. I just held her gaze. And there was like an acknowledgment. You know, like she wasn’t saying anything, but she was saying everything.”
“I had an amazing vocal coach, and I did a couple of movement classes just to become more aware of my body, because I realized, having done a lot of television and film so close up, you’re not always having to be aware of how your body is emoting or projecting energy,” Comer said. “And I suddenly realized, ‘Oh, hang on a minute, like I have to use from the tip of my head to the tip of my toes!’”
Comer, 30, and I spoke recently in a chic dining spot in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District. She was refreshingly without pretense: I showed up 15 minutes early for the interview. So did she. It was not a fake-chummy encounter, but rather a straightforward chat about the task at hand. When the check came, I offered to pay. She said, “Let’s split it.” So we did.
Posted by admin on April 04, 2023
Jodie Comer became a household name after starring in Killing Eve, scooping multiple awards—including an Emmy and a BAFTA—for her portrayal of Villanelle in the series. At the Olivier Awards on Sunday night, the star added another statue to her trophy cupboard, picking up the Best Actress gong for her West End debut as a conflicted young barrister, Tessa, in Prima Facie.
“This was a really significant moment in time for me, and I wanted a dress that would make the occasion all the more memorable,” says Comer who, with the help of her stylist Elizabeth Saltzman, picked a sculptural poly faille dress for what would become her winning night, from Alexander McQueen’s most recent fall 2023 collection.
The actor serendipitously came across a quote once said by the house’s late founder, Lee Alexander McQueen, on Instagram as she was deciding what to wear for the ceremony. McQueen once said he designed clothes because he didn’t want women to look “all innocent and naïve”. “I don’t like women to be taken advantage of,” the designer said. “I don’t like men whistling at women in the street. I think they deserve more respect… I know what misogyny is… I want people to be afraid of the women I dress.”
Comer, whose character in Prima Facie specializes in defending men accused of sexual assault, and then herself becomes a victim of assault, was instantly struck by the quote, she says. “It really resonated with me and it felt so appropriate given Prima Facie’s themes and messaging. It also felt like a little sign from the universe that McQueen was the perfect choice for my first Olivier Awards,” asserts the actor.
Saltzman, who has worked with the former British Vogue cover star since her Killing Eve days, echoes her sentiment: “McQueen has always been a brand that embraces a strong confident woman,” she tells Vogue, adding: “When anyone slips into a McQueen, you feel instantly empowered.” The moment she saw Sarah Burton’s latest collection, shown at Paris Fashion Week in March, she fell in love with Look 22, captivated by its striking red shade—a trending color to emerge on the recent red carpets and runways—and cascading ruffles.
The deconstructed trench silhouette taps into the “anatomy of tailoring” theme that Burton explored this season, which the creative director said was inspired by the beginnings of McQueen on Savile Row. “It was a progression, which starts very kind of straight and structured. And then it begins to flash and twist and turn upside down,” Burton explained. “It’s like how you begin with a garment—you have to know that there’s a way to construct it, the bones of it, before you can dissect it and subvert it.”
Posted by admin on February 23, 2023
Jodie Comer stars this spring in Prima Facie, which begins previews at the John Golden Theatre on April 11. Valentino shirt. Gucci pants. The Row loafers. Cartier watch. Fashion Editor: Max Ortega.Photographed by Norman Jean Roy, Vogue, March 2023.
Between 2018 and 2022, Jodie Comer became a star with her virtuoso performance as the gorgeous, gleefully sociopathic assassin Villanelle on the BBC America series Killing Eve, winning a BAFTA and an Emmy and causing everyone to freak out about how great she was. But what she’d always wanted to do was act on the stage. As a 12-year-old in Liverpool, she won first prize at a local drama festival for a monologue about the 1989 Hillsborough Stadium disaster, and at 17 she appeared in a play called The Price of Everything at a theater-in-the-round in Scarborough, North Yorkshire. Still, despite continuing to audition for theatrical roles while she worked in TV and film throughout her teens and 20s, the stage remained elusive. “A lot of the feedback was great,” Comer tells me over tea in New York in her unvarnished Scouse accent. (She is apartment shopping in the city when we meet, a big step after living at home with her parents and younger brother for much of the pandemic.) “But one thing that was resounding was, like, ‘She hasn’t been to drama school and this is too big a task for someone who isn’t classically trained.’ I used to feel quite defeated by that.”
Not one to take “maybe” for an answer, the 29-year-old made her professional stage debut last year with Prima Facie, a stunning one-woman piece by Australian playwright Suzie Miller. In it, Comer gave a critically acclaimed, Evening Standard Award–winning performance as Tessa Ensler (Miller’s nod to The Vagina Monologues author Eve Ensler, now known as V), a razor-sharp young defense lawyer whose facility in the courtroom—especially in cases dealing with sexual assault—becomes effectively meaningless when she must take the stand herself after being raped. Alienated and traumatized, she is quickly disabused of the notion that the legal games she once loved to play had anything to do with seeking justice. “She knows that she’s fiercely intelligent, and she owns that,” Comer says of Tessa, who is all swaggering bravado when the play begins. “She takes joy in her great power. And, of course, that makes the fall—when she’s forced to face everything from the other side—even harder.”
Prima Facie is now headed from the West End to Broadway’s John Golden Theatre, where New York audiences will get to discover in Comer what Justin Martin, the show’s director (The Jungle), saw from the start. “Fundamentally, she’s a stage animal,” he says. “She has an incredible sense of humor and an emotional rawness. She’s very, very honest and absolutely fearless. And all of that bleeds into her performance and the choices that she makes onstage. It’s a natural home for her.”
For Miller’s part, she was so persuaded by what she’d seen in Killing Eve that she didn’t initially realize Comer was English. When her name first came up, “I said, ‘Why would we cast a Russian actor?’ ” the playwright remembers with a laugh. Discovering that Comer shared the working-class background Miller had written for Tessa—who has learned to take advantage of being underestimated—moved her to the top of the list.
As research, Comer and the creative team got to spend time at the Central Criminal Court of England and Wales—more commonly known as the Old Bailey—and observe London barristers at work. (After attending law school at the University of New South Wales, Miller practiced as a human rights and criminal defense lawyer until 2010, when she shifted to playwriting full-time.) “It very much felt like theater,” Comer recalls. “Everyone was playing their role, everyone knew their lines, everyone knew when to come in and when not to come in. It felt presentational in that way, like acting. But the stakes were so incredibly high.” When I suggest that Tessa querying a witness might not be a far throw from Villanelle toying with a victim before swooping in for the kill, Comer says, “Absolutely. She’s like a bird with its prey. She’s having so much fun—playing around with him, making it painful. She’s like, This guy is a fucking idiot, and he has no clue what’s about to come.”
Yet the minds behind Prima Facie also recognize the responsibility they have, staging a 100-minute play about the many ways that a legal system devised by men can fail survivors of sexual violence. “It just felt like we would not be doing our job if we didn’t, as people left the theater, give them some way to deal with what they’ve experienced and hopefully effect some change,” says producer James Bierman. So, the production formed a partnership with Everyone’s Invited, a digital platform where survivors can anonymously share their stories, as well as the Schools Consent Project, a charity devoted to educating teenagers about consent and sexual assault. (Based in the UK, it is due to begin operations Stateside this spring.) “If you want to watch Prima, and you like what Prima stands for, then you have to engage with this, because the two things are absolutely linked,” Bierman adds. “The play doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It exists in a world where Tessa is all too real.”
The response to the play has already been overwhelming; in Australia, where Prima Facie premiered in 2019, and again in England, “we just got so many messages from women,” Miller says. “Handwritten letters dropped off at the stage door, email after email, DMs…I mean, I’ve gotten hundreds a day of women saying, ‘This is what happened to me.’ ” In the long shadow of the #MeToo movement, she finds that now more than ever, “audiences are hungry to have conversations about systems that govern; systems around them that they don’t think are innately fair.” Happily, this isn’t just a show that talks—it’s one that absolutely roars.
Posted by admin on April 07, 2022
As Killing Eve reaches its finale, shape-shifting star Jodie Comer talks to Rosamund Dean about how her gritty West End debut took priority over Ridley Scott’s next epic
Photoshoots > 2022 > Session 006-Evening Standard Magazine
Last month, Jodie Comer was in a studio to record her last bits of dialogue for the final ever episode of Killing Eve. ‘It was surreal,’ she says, eyes wide. ‘They had this sofa in the centre of the screen, so I sat there and asked them to play me the final moments. I was like… wow.’
We’re meeting for breakfast in a Mayfair members’ club the day before her 29th birthday. Comer is not having a party though. Last weekend she had a family dinner in Liverpool (the tasting menu at Röski, which she recommends as ‘it lasts about three hours so you really have time to catch up’) and, on the day, she is going to see Small Island at the National Theatre with a friend. As she tucks in to overnight oats and an espresso, I dig for spoilers of the Killing Eve finale. Many are hoping Eve and Villanelle will get together and go off into the sunset. ‘Yeah, I mean…’ she laughs, with a raised eyebrow.
But then again, the show is literally called Killing Eve, which doesn’t bode well for Eve. ‘Well, you’d think that, but is it ‘Killing’ Eve? Or is it Killing ‘Eve’?’ she asks, mysteriously. ‘Eve’s changed so much, especially in this series. I was like whoa, Sandra!’
Villanelle is, of course, Russian. Which, in series one, felt kind of retro Cold War but now feels much darker. Continuing to live our normal lives — in my case, chatting to an actor — with pictures of Ukrainian devastation on every front page is a strange business. ‘Everything else is so insignificant,’ says Comer. ‘The world right now is extremely sinister. Russian people are being fed so much misinformation. It’s terrifying when you realise there are people in power who have the ability to do that, and choose to do that. And the number of people who are none the wiser.’
The show won Comer an Emmy and a Bafta, and launched her in Hollywood. Last year she starred in Free Guy with Ryan Reynolds and The Last Duel with Matt Damon and Adam Driver. But her new role is more low-key: Prima Facie is a one-woman play about a barrister who defends rapists, before becoming a victim herself. She pulled out of Ridley Scott’s new film, Napoleon, to do it (that role will now be played by Vanessa Kirby).
‘That decision was actually taken out of my hands,’ she admits. ‘The scheduling kept changing, and I was always committed to the play. So it came to a point where it was impossible to do both.’ It’s safe to assume that one of those jobs is significantly better paid than the other, and she could have pulled out of the play to take the money.
‘Ha! Yeah,’ she laughs, ‘but I never got into this for the pay cheque. I’m going to grow so much from this experience. Sometimes opportunities present themselves and you’re like, if I say no, it will be purely out of fear. If I said no to this because I was scared and then they announced another actress, I’d want to punch myself in the face.’
Comer threw herself into research, speaking to barristers and a Rasso (rape and serious sexual offences) officer. ‘Because Napoleon fell through, I’ve had this time to speak to people who have been so open and honest, which has been amazing,’ she says. ‘They care so much about what they’re doing, but it’s very evident that the system doesn’t work for women. If a woman reports being raped, it’s her who’s on trial. She’s given this burden of responsibility to prove what happened.’
Thirty tickets at each performance will be available at a ‘pay what you can’ price, something Comer feels strongly about, telling me ‘theatre shouldn’t be this exclusive club. That’s so wrong.’ She is aware of the privilege that gave many in her industry a leg-up, and talks of the twist of fate that introduced her to Stephen Graham. They met on 2012’s Liverpool-set drama Good Cop, and he introduced her to his agent. Comer and Graham worked together again last year on Help, a Channel 4 drama set in a care home during the first lockdown, and a rare outing for her real (Scouse) accent. ‘I’d never done a project like that before, which is political and really raw because many people were still living through it,’ she says. ‘We really felt the weight of how important it was.’
It is testament to her transformative ability that playing a Liverpudlian care worker doesn’t feel at odds with the Comer we see on the red carpet or in a fashion shoot like the one on the cover of this magazine. ‘I sent over a plethora of young Meryl Streep images,’ she laughs of the mood board for this shoot. ‘They were pared back, very simple, which I really enjoyed. It’s important to me now to feel comfortable. I said to my stylist, Elizabeth [Saltzman, who also works with Gwyneth Paltrow], as we moved out of lockdown: it’s great to wear fabulous clothes that you wouldn’t usually wear, but actually I want to be comfortable and look back on those moments and see that.’
Today she’s wearing workout clothes — a black T-shirt and leggings — because ‘my iron’s broke and everything else is scrunched up’. Comer’s style revelation wasn’t the only change of the past couple of years. ‘We were all forced to pause and evaluate what’s really meaningful to us,’ she says. ‘I realised I love being at home and enjoy simpler things. Like having my close friends, not feeling the need to be certain places and please certain people. I grew up a lot. I really stepped into myself. I’ve got calmer and more secure in who I am. I mean,’ she adds hastily, ‘I’ve by no means got it all sussed out. That’s a lifelong thing.’
Comer and her family are tight. As we talk, she plays with a large heart-shaped Loquet locket; a gift from her mum, Donna. ‘It has amethyst in it, and a little moon charm. I have a habit of fiddling with it when I’m nervous.’ She has said in the past that she would like to live at home in Liverpool with Donna and her dad, Jimmy, until she is ‘old and grey’. But now she has a place in London, although who she lives with is unclear because she never talks about that side of her life.
‘It’s increasingly important to manage those things,’ she says carefully. ‘So much is out of your control so the parts of your life that you can control become really sacred.’ I’m impressed that they avoid ever being papped. ‘If I go to a party, I want to be in my mate’s living room listening to Fall Out Boy on a playlist of early 2000s hits,’ she says. ‘That’s where I’m letting my hair down, not at an event where I’m seen leaving. That terrifies me.’
As she approaches her 30s, she has also learned to care less about what other people think. No small feat in her job, where you are relentlessly presented with other people’s opinions. ‘I’ve got a different outlook on what success is,’ she explains. ‘Now it comes down to how I feel when I come home from a day’s work. If I feel proud of myself. I’m much better at not putting that on the opinions of others, because I did for a really long time.’
Was there a turning point? ‘You just become aware of your habits…. I was seeking a lot of approval and my happiness was dependent on it, then I realised how shit that made me feel.’ Is it things like stepping back from social media and not reading reviews? ‘Yeah. If I’m doing a job for me then, whatever the reaction may be, I can say, okay that’s unfortunate, however I gained X, Y and Z from this.’ (Despite the Scouse accent, she says ‘zee’ rather than ‘zed’.) Not that Comer has experienced many bad reviews. Even mixed reviews of the last season of Killing Eve fell over themselves to say that she remained amazing. There was a brief attempt to ‘cancel’ her on social media, when it was rumoured her boyfriend was a Republican. Regardless of her boyfriend’s political views, I don’t think anyone — particularly a person involved in projects such as Help and Prima Facie — should be bullied into proving their liberal credentials.
I ask the name of her favourite WhatsApp group and she replies instantly: ‘Me and my best mates from school are all over the place, so it’s called Hoes in Different Area Codes.’ She laughs uproariously. ‘It’s Katarina [Johnson-Thompson], she’s an Olympic athlete so she’s always away training. My friend Charlotte is an artist, she lives in Spain. Then my other friends are in Liverpool. We managed to get together for a weekend last year and it was amazing. Friends are such medicine. The person that you can fall into being when you’re in their company is just so pure. I mean, the title of our WhatsApp group isn’t pure!’
When Comer talks about her friends and family, she glows with warmth. Perhaps this solid background is the secret to her success because she says the energy you bring to an audition is vital. She doesn’t have to audition much these days, but she remembers the anxiety of her early career, when she had been on Holby City and Waterloo Road but wasn’t continuously working so got a job in Tesco. ‘There were a couple years where I’d done acting jobs, but also I needed money to go out at the weekend with my friends,’ she smiles. ‘I was on the tills on the Saturday/Sunday shift, so was hungover 99.9 per cent of the time.’
I sympathise, having worked on a checkout at the same age, but in Waitrose. ‘Oh, you’re so fancy!’ Her face lights up again. ‘I was trying to explain Waitrose to my boyfriend the other day. He said, “Is that like Whole Foods?” I told him it’s not as fancy as Whole Foods, but it’s fancy.’ It’s fancier than Tesco, but not as fancy as M&S? ‘I love an M&S,’ she sighs dreamily. ‘One thing that I find deeply satisfying is doing a good food shop.’
And this is the real Jodie Comer: texting her mates, hanging out with her boyfriend, doing a big food shop and, today, dealing with a broken iron. ‘I called my mum and she said it’s the fuse, so I’m going fuse shopping now,’ she laughs. ‘So rock ’n’ roll.’
The final season of ‘Killing Eve’ is on BBC iPlayer now. ‘Prima Facie’ is at the Harold Pinter Theatre from 15 Apr to 18 Jun (haroldpintertheatre.co.uk)
