Jodie attended the Unveiling of her Caricature honouring her performance in “Prima Facie” on Broadway last night at Sardi’s. Photos have been added, enjoy!

Jodie attended the 2023 World Theatre Awards last night in New York, photos of her attending have been added to the gallery, enjoy!

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

New York Times

Jodie Comer, who won an Emmy for her role of a Russian assassin on TV’s “Killing Eve,” is now an Olivier Award-winner and Tony-nominee for her performance in the one-woman play “Prima Facie,” as a London barrister confronting injustice in the legal system with regards to victims of sexual assault. CBS News’ Erin Moriarty talks with Comer, and with playwright Suzie Miller, about the dynamics of the play, the responses from audiences, and how a “scrappy” young woman from Liverpool with no formal training found success on stage.

When asked if she expected the impact that the play, and her performance, would have, Comer replied, “No, no, I think we were all really taken aback by it, actually. But I remember when we did the first preview in London – and this was the first time performing in front of an audience – a lot of it was crying, like very audibly and very quite loud and unashamed, and very guttural.”

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I have added Screencaps,Stills, and Promos of Jodie in the upcoming video game “Alone in The Dark”. You can also find screencaps of the Interview as well, enjoy!

The script for the play “Prima Facie” didn’t languish after landing in Jodie Comer’s inbox

The script for the play “Prima Facie” didn’t languish after landing in Jodie Comer‘s inbox. Fitting for an urgent call for change, the script demanded action. It would not be denied.

“Sometimes when things present themselves, it’s impossible to say no,” says the “Killing Eve” actor. “This piece felt very, very clear to me. There was no hesitation that I felt. Sometimes that kind of guttural instinct really doesn’t lie.”

It didn’t matter that the script represented Comer’s first stage role. No matter that she’d be alone for some 90 minutes, even asked to move her own props. “I read it within the hour and I was like, ‘What have I got to do?’”

Comer leapt in and has found herself winning an Olivier Award in London for her performance and now a Tony nomination for best actress in a play. She’s also raising her fist for women in a work that challenges the status quo.

The script was from Suzie Miller, a former criminal defense and human rights lawyer who uses the one-woman show to illustrate how current laws fail terribly when it comes to sexual assault cases.

Comer plays Tessa Ensler, a young, clever barrister who has developed a knack for getting her male clients off the hook in assault cases until she spends a night drinking with another barrister and he rapes her.

Now, instead of donning a fancy wig as a crown prosecutor, she’s left shaking in the witness box. Why isn’t her evidence presented in a clean, logical package? She must relive her nightmare in court with her motives questioned. And justice may hinge not on the actions, but on whether the perpetrator believed he had consent.

“A woman’s experience of sexual assault does not fit the male-defined system of truth. So it cannot be truth, and therefore there cannot be justice,” she says in the play.

“Prima Facie” — a legal term meaning “on the face of it” — has already created shock waves in England. A filmed version is now compulsory viewing for new judges, and Miller says a judge who saw her play has redrafted the spoken directions juries are given in sexual assault matters. The play has inspired efforts to change British laws.

Both Comer and Miller get hundreds of messages a week from women telling their own stories of assault, some telling about it for the first time, part of a larger movement fueled by #MeToo.

“I’m really trying to savor every second of it because not every piece of work creates this sort of conversation or space,” says Comer. “That is the biggest reward of all —when you are a part of a piece like this and people genuinely feel represented. That it is a source of comfort.”

To win a Tony on June 11, Comer must beat Jessica Chastain in “A Doll’s House,” Jessica Hecht in “Summer, 1976” and Audra McDonald from “Ohio State Murders.”

In terms of sheer physicality, Comer earns it every night. She moves tables together, jumps up on them, sits in rain, uses various voices and performs her own character’s rape.

“It really helped me build my kind of mental resilience, even though I have moments that is absolutely challenged,” she says. “I would say what I’ve learned from this experience is that you have to take care of yourself.”

Miller was inspired to write “Prima Facie” by the years she spent as a lawyer taking statements from hundreds of women who had been sexually assaulted. “Not a single one of them who went to trial actually ended up having a conviction,” she says. “The worst things is they’re all so similar.”

Her first play, “Cross Sections,” was about the homeless and the desperate living in the red-light district in Sydney, Australia, a work which humanized what many believed were throw-away people.

“After I wrote that there was a lightning bolt moment for me, which was, ‘Oh, wow, stories really can make people empathize and think about things,’” she says.

Miller has since taken up the baton of V — the “Vagina Monologues” playwright formerly known as Eve Ensler, who brings social messages to her work. It is no coincidence that Miller named the heroine of “Prima Facie” Tessa Ensler.

The idea of battling the establishment also attracted Comer, an Emmy Award and BAFTA winner, who grew up in the working class of Liverpool and has had to shapeshift in order to succeed, like her character.

When she was auditioning for theater roles, she was rebuffed because she hadn’t attended drama school. “There was a lot of feedback of like, ‘She’s not trained. It’s too big a task,’” she recalls.

The producers of “Prima Facie” didn’t ask her to audition and didn’t mind she hadn’t attended drama school.

“They didn’t see it as this kind of hindrance. And so I guess the stars all aligned at the right time,” Comer says. “This is beyond anything I could have ever dreamed.”

The Independent 

Jodie Comer attended the  89th Annual Drama League Awards today in New York. Photos have been added to our gallery, enjoy!

Jodie attended the  76th Annual Tony Awards Meet The Nominees Press Event held in New York yesterday! Photos of her attending the event have been added. Enjoy!

New York Times-The actress hopes that the production will continue to generate discussions about sexual violence, and noted the amazing reaction.

That Jodie Comer should be nominated for her role in Prima Facie, which has already earned her Laurence Olivier and Evening Standard Theater Awards, should not come as a surprise to anyone. Except, apparently, Comer herself.

“I’m in shock ,” she said from a taxi on Tuesday morning.

In Prima Facie, which also received nominations for Best Stage Design, Best Lighting and Best Sound, Comer plays Tessa, an ambitious young lawyer whose world is turned upside down after she is raped by a colleague. With pity, sensuality, and genuine emotion, Comer reenacts this attack and its aftermath 8 times a week, standing on stage in the rain (usually, though not always, warmed up by the backstage crew) while Tessa tries to take a fresh look at her life and existing laws.

Comer hopes the play will continue to spark discussions about sexual violence and that her nomination will benefit the many women she is trying to impersonate. Below are edited excerpts from our conversation.

What do you feel?

We’ve come a long way with this piece – I never thought we’d get to this point. So it’s an incredible feeling. The overall response has been amazing and I am very, very grateful that the work of so many team members has been appreciated. I can’t emphasize enough just how much team effort was put into this production.

That evening, when I was watching the performance, I heard some of the audience crying at the very end. Does the local public react differently than the London public?

The only difference, in my opinion, is the mood. But given how global the topic itself is, the reaction was very, very British. Many people have sent us backstage letters telling us about their experience of watching the play and how it affected them. We were also contacted by people who managed to see the play both in London and on Broadway to share how their lives had changed over the past year. Therefore, there is a feeling that we can have the same conversation here.

Your nomination is clear proof of the production’s stunning debut on Broadway. But given what the play is about, do you think the nomination means a lot more?

I hope so. There are so many people in this world that I am grateful for their existence and that I represent. This nomination should speak not only about me.

What’s the fun in playing Tessa despite what happened to her?

In the whole production, I love the journey that Tessa is going on. The evolution of this woman, even in a truly difficult period, her sense of self, strength and resilience – this is what I am delighted with. She emerges from the current situation definitely changed, but definitely not defeated. Tessa is still hopeful. We get a lot of messages in the spirit of “I felt broken, but at the same time inspired.”

When the actress Jodie Comer first read the description of Villanelle—the assassin and antihero of the spy series “Killing Eve”—she responded with dismay: “How naked is she going to be?” She imagined catsuits and stiletto heels. Instead, she found herself in brocade Dries Van Noten suits and custom-dyed Chloé—a dandy psychopath, a huntress, who never sacrifices style for efficiency when dispatching her victims. She strangles one with a necktie, kills another with poisoned perfume, and sparks a very understandable erotic fixation in the M.I.6 agent (Sandra Oh) on her heels. Even as the script sagged in later seasons, Comer’s command remained absolute. She garnered a small shelf of awards and handled success with a total lack of pretense. “Our show doesn’t have a huge message to the world,” she said with cheerful bluntness. “That’s probably why people enjoy it so much.”

In the rehearsal room of “Prima Facie” hangs another wall of images, mostly of women and girls. They are the photographs Comer has collected to conjure Tessa. In one, a woman draws a mustache on herself—Tessa going to court, Comer explained, “thinking of what she has to become.” A blank-eyed woman in an embrace—Tessa after the assault. There are photographs of a man’s wrist encircled by a heavy watch, photographs of Liverpool in the nineteen-nineties, street kids mugging for the camera. Tessa has scrabbled out of a loving, brawling world, catapulting herself to Cambridge to become a star barrister. Her mother, she tells us, cleans offices like the one she works in. Her vigilance—her awareness of being scrutinized, assessed, dismissed—has become a kind of superpower, an acute understanding of judgment and persuasion. She is a connoisseur of contempt, a human barometer of doubt—not that she seems to possess any herself. The law is blood sport for her, but behind it is righteous pride. “Prosecutors, you work with the police. You say you are fighting for justice. You are fighting for jail time,” she says. “It’s our job to find holes in the case, to protect society.”

At the center of the wall is a photograph of Comer as a girl—a large cast on her leg, grinning as she sails down a slide. (“I peaked,” she said, wryly.) To think about Tessa at her freest, Comer gave her the gift of her own childhood. The actress’s “source energy” seems to arise from this place—the Liverpool suburb of Childwall, where her mother is a transport worker and her father is a physical therapist for the Everton Football Club. The parish priest still sends letters to Comer’s family, reflecting on each of her roles. (On Villanelle, he’s spoken “about the depths he feels I would have to go to in order [to] understand why a person would be like this,” Comer said.) She spent much of the pandemic back home, playing badminton with her brother over the washing line. “We were like kids again, having to knock at the neighbor’s door, like, ‘Can you throw the ball back over?’ ”

One of Comer’s first proper roles came at twelve, for a monologue at a school talent show. She played a child who had lost her father in the 1989 Hillsborough tragedy: a stampede, during a Liverpool football match, that killed more than ninety people. When her name was called, Comer found herself already in tears; the emotion was bewilderingly easy to access. She had something powerful inside her, her drama teacher said, and she needed to learn to harness it. (In “Killing Eve,” Villanelle’s former handler gives her a strikingly similar speech.) Bit parts followed, in radio plays and “Law & Order: UK.” Comer worked the weekend-morning shifts at Tesco, “hungover 99.9 per cent of the time.” In lieu of formal training, she cribbed Villanelle’s facial expressions from her mother, and developed a facility with accents by imitating advertisements with her father. She remembers his face, awed and proud, the first time he saw her perform. “I’m always chasing” that face “in some way,” she said.

Comer invokes her family with an insistence that begins to make sense when one realizes how often her background was seen as a liability. Although she worked steadily, there were fallow periods. Casting directors were incredulous at her Northern accent. Theatre was impossible to break into; she was not educated enough, she was told, not trained. When she started out, she wanted to be Keira Knightley, to wallow in big frocks and yearning. Instead, she has become known for characters marked by their mastery—a mastery acquired in private, at cost, and intended as a kind of armor. Onstage, when Tessa speaks, in her strong Scouse accent, of being patronized, of desperately counting on her vigilance and nice manners, on her brilliance and ambition to prize open the doors so intent on keeping her out, Comer’s fury is electrifying.

The London dress run of “Prima Facie” was plagued with problems. At one point, when Tessa changes clothes onstage, Comer got her head stuck in a shirt. But the previews indicated something special at work. In the last fifteen minutes of the play, Tessa speaks directly to the audience. A woman in the front began to cry, making deep guttural noises. “It was like little lights going off all over the theatre,” Comer recalled. “It was spreading. It was as if people in the audience were giving each other unspoken permission to feel.”

Of course, it is Tessa who grants the permission. Standing at the front of the stage, she points into the audience: “I see all the women who came before me, all the women who will come after.” Her bluster is gone. She is no longer the star defense lawyer but the victim, humiliated by taking the stand and withstanding the very interrogation techniques that she once deployed with pride: the suggestion of inconsistencies in memory, of ulterior motives influencing the rape accusation. “In all of my professional life, I have participated in a system that has done this to women, and now I know it is not right,” she says. “If the women’s experience of rape is not as the court would like it to be, then we conclude she is prone to exaggeration.”

The play wavers at the end, unsure where to send the shattered Tessa. Lines curdle into cliché: “I am broken, too, but I’m still here, and I will not be silenced”; “Somewhere, somehow, something has to change.” But Comer always seems to shine when scripts struggle—screenwriters from Phoebe Waller-Bridge to Matt Damon praise how she sees the character beyond the page. Here, she does something interesting. She does not fight the clichés but leans into them, lets us feel Tessa reach for them, choose them—what else can she say? As she speaks, her hands hang at her sides, grasping at air. She seems shorn of language, of certainty, suddenly doubting everything but herself.

Comer began hearing from women almost immediately: women who had recognized something in their past, who were on the verge of leaving the law but now saw a reason to persist. The dynamic is woven into the action of the play—the way the house lights come on at the end, enabling the audience to see one another, to see themselves, and to see Tessa, who draws near and says, “There was a time, not so long ago, when courts like this did not ‘see’ nonconsensual sex in marriage as rape, did not ‘see’ that battered women fight back in a manner distinct from the way men fight.” How, she asks, can we unsee what we now know?

Recently, watching a recording of the play, I found those lines nagging at me. I called Comer. Broadway rehearsals had begun, and her voice was different—slower, assured. She was struck by how rare it is for an actor to return to familiar material, to infuse it with what they now know. I asked her what Tessa had allowed her to see. I recalled how, when she concentrates, she closes her eyes and taps between her brows. She seemed to be doing that now. She responded, “I have nothing to prove.”