Jodie and Austin Butler was on the Kelly Clarkson show back in June last month. Photos of them both have been added to our gallery, along with Screencaps,enjoy!

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.

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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.

 

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.”

She’s a rare breed of actor, one who seemingly can do no wrong.

From one project to the next, Jodie Comer’s talent only seems to grow as the world takes watch.

The Liverpudlian is undoubtedly one of the country’s finest performers and her latest film ‘The End We Start From’ is demonstrative of just why her stock is so high within the industry.

She plays a new mum, whose son is born into an apocalyptic world. Climate change has come to a devastating head and Jodie’s character “mother” is forced to abandon her home in search of safety.

While the film isn’t ostensibly about raising awareness of ecological and environmental issues, Jodie believes it could get people talking.

“They are in the midst of a climate crisis, but I think in the telling of the story so much of that is symbolic of her experience.

“It’s quite a nuanced telling. I think all art has that ability, change happens even if it’s just a conversation between friends.”

Whether it’s the charismatic physcopath she played in Killing Eve, or her multiple award-winning stint as a defence barrister on stage in Prima Face, Jodie seeks out work that forces her to dig deep.

I ask her why she leans towards raw and tangible projects and her response is simply, “they excite me and provoke emotion,” she says.

“It’s what I’m drawn to and I think you learn something different on every job, which always kind of stays with you.”

The End We Start From is an outlier in the “disaster movie” sphere, in that there aren’t many scenes of widespread chaos or drawn-out fight sequences.

Rather it favours a focus on individual experience and emotion from within to help deliver the story.

Director Mahalia Belo, who gave birth during lockdown, wanted the film to be as much about the mother and her baby, as it was about the world crumbling around them.

“I like it when films speak about the internal in an external way. You kind of manage to get scale and scope through that,” she says.

“It was important to feel rooted around a women’s journey. It’s about the future and what we are raising them (our children) into.”

Having seen the movie, I can tell you that there is rarely a moment where Jodie is without a baby in her arms.

Real babies were used for the majority of filming and that often posed a charming challenge for the cast.

Jodie remembers the one big rule that “they have to have a break every 20 minutes”.

They’d be “taken away after 20 minutes and another baby would be brought in. Motherhood is explored in a very unique way and working with babies so extensively really created beautiful, honest and spontaneous moments.”

The End We Start From is in cinemas on January 19.

ITV News

Best known for her BAFTA and Emmy award winning performance as the cold-blooded assassin Villanelle in Killing Eve, Jodie Comer is back and has teamed up with the award-winning British Director Mahalia Belo.

Their new environmental disaster thriller ‘The End We Start From’ sees Jodie’s character giving birth amid the floodwaters of a submerged London.

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

Jodie Comer has an Emmy, a Tony, and the sort of incandescent beauty that prompts skincare brands to start writing huge cheques. She also used to work on the checkout at Tesco, loves a roast dinner and – despite being halfway to EGOT status and fully a household name – lived at home with her mum and dad in Liverpool until earlier this year. White hot Hollywood property she may be, but Jodie, 30, remains undeniably, delightfully British.

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.

 

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