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.
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
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.”
David Harbour stated that he did a horror game with Jodie Comer, but it wasn’t clear what game it was. That has now been confirmed, as the two actors are the two main characters in the upcoming Alone in the Dark remake.
Who are David Harbour and Jodie Comer in the Alone in the Dark remake?
Harbour plays a detective Edward Carnby, a grizzled private investigator that’s quite visually different from its 1992 counterpart. Writer and game director Mikael Hedberg, who’s known for writing Frictional Games’ first two Amnesia titles and Soma, said that Harbour has a “strong presence” as an actor and can do well in both comical and dramatic situations. Harbour also chimed in about the series and what he likes about Edward.
“I knew of past iterations of the game,” said Harbour. “The video game world is something that I’m very interested in in general. The horror genre specifically. He’s kind of a gruff detective and he’s searching for something, and he’s hard-boiled, but he’s got some humor to him. He’s a bit of a trope or a type, and I like that. And I like the world and sort of how he’s exploring this insanity amidst all the horror and stuff.”
Comer plays Emily Hartwood, the niece of Jeremy Hartwood who has been haunted by a character named the Dark Man. Hedberg said Comer brings a lot of nuance to the character, which makes it easier for players to sympathize with her. Comer also talked about Hartwood and how she tried to juggle all Emily’s complexities.
“I love the mystery of the game, and I love the picture of her,” said Comer. “There was so much about her that I was curious of. There’s a lot of fear within her and a lot of speculation, curiosity, dread, intrigue. There’s a lot about her that’s on edge. Yes, there is the scary element, but then she still has to go on a journey and discover different things. And there should still be room to breathe and have a funny moment or a sarcastic moment or a moment of discovery. So it’s just trying to keep all of those other beats alive amongst the darkness of it all.”
Developer Pieces Interactive also spoke more about the game by talking about the psychological horror that is “more than just jump scares,” the resource-driven gunplay, numerous puzzles, and thick atmosphere. The team also announced the release date for the game, which is October 25 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC.
Jodie Comer is nominated for Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role in a Play.
Just over a month ago, Jodie Comer took the stage at the Royal Albert Hall to accept an Olivier Award for her outstanding performance in Prima Facie. Now that she has brought the monumental role to Broadway, is a Tony Award next?
“The relationship with the audience has been so special. The effect that this story is having on people… we receive letters daily,” she told BroadwayWorld’s Richard Ridge. “We’re seeing firsthand how this play is provoking change.”
Below, watch as Jodie chats more about how the play is impacting audiences, the honor of this nomination, and so much more. Plus, check out who she is up against and catch up on all the latest Tony Awards coverage!
The ‘Killing Eve’ actress made her West End and Broadway debut in the role, in which she is solo on stage for the entirety of the drama.
In the Envelope: The Actor’s Podcast features in-depth conversations with today’s most noteworthy actors and creators. Join host and senior editor Vinnie Mancuso for this guide to living the creative life from those who are doing it every day.
Earlier this month, Jodie Comer scored a Tony nomination for her work in Suzie Miller’s one-woman play “Prima Facie.” In the show, which debuted on the West End last year, the actor plays Tessa, a barrister whose sense of self is upended by a sexual assault. It’s an astonishing 100-minute performance in which Comer—best known for her Emmy-winning turn on BBC America’s “Killing Eve” and her role in Ridley Scott’s “The Last Duel”—doesn’t leave the stage once. Given the skill with which she takes audiences on that journey night after night, it’s easy to forget that this is her Broadway debut.
“When I took on this role, I didn’t know how I was going to do it, truth be told. And I think that was a huge draw,” Comer tells us. “I was completely in awe. I thought, How will I ever execute this? I was really interested in that journey of: How do I get from where I am now, having no idea how I’m going to do it and struggling to imagine it, to performing this eight nights a week?”
On this episode of In the Envelope: The Actor’s Podcast, Comer dives deep into how her performance took shape and the realities of carrying a Broadway show on your back eight shows a week.
Comer’s leap into theater involved accepting that no two performances are the same.
“The first preview we had was euphoric. I really only remember the last 10 minutes of it; it was like someone was literally carrying me around the stage. And then the second night, I remember just thinking the whole way through, Just get to the end; just get to the end. Because I felt like I was pushing it, you know? It was so hard. It’s about learning that every show is so different. It will be what it will be. It’s kind of throwing it over your shoulder and letting it go, then getting the next opportunity the next evening or the next afternoon. I’ve really enjoyed embracing that. I think there’s something really healthy about having to embrace that mentality.”
She has also embraced rolling with the kind of mistakes that only happen in live theater.
“We had a night a couple of weeks ago where it actually just became hilarious. The jacket fell off one of the chairs. And I was like, When am I going to get that? When am I going to pick that up? So I picked it up and put it on the wrong chair. It would have been the chair she uses as the bathroom when the assault happens, so that wouldn’t have been great. So then I was figuring out, OK, how do I get the jacket off? Then I picked up the wrong folder, and the folder wouldn’t go back in the wall. I forgot to take my coat off. This was all one night. I came offstage, and we were all like, ‘What the hell?’
But there was something wonderful about that. It really enabled me to go, Right, this is my space. It’s not the end of the world. I’m in control of this. Once you have those kind of moments, you realize, Oh, I have permission to command this space.”
More important to Comer than awards recognition is the impact “Prima Facie” is having on the audience.
“We get so many people reaching out and writing letters. There was one lady who had seen the play in London and said she was moved; she was crying in the audience, and the play had enabled her to have conversations with their family about her own sexual assault. She then came to the show on Broadway and wrote to us saying how her life over the past year had drastically changed. And then she was in the audience in [the show’s] final moment, in a very different point, surrounded by other women who were having the experience that she had the year before. I thought, There’s something so poignant about that—how it is helping people and what that experience is for people when they’re sat watching surrounded by everyone else. It’s really powerful.”
Comer’s goal with every project she takes on is to stay true to herself.
“As long as I go into something for my own reasons, with integrity and a clear view of what it is I am getting from it and what it is that I wanted to do, I feel like it is much easier to then accept when things don’t necessarily resonate with an audience or isn’t critically acclaimed or people don’t think it’s good. It’s much easier to separate myself from that when I know that I did the job because I believed in it, I love the character, and I was proud of the work that I did.
If I’d taken ‘The Last Duel’ because it was guaranteed to change my life financially and I’d never have to think about anything ever again, and then it flopped? Then I have to live with the fact that I haven’t been true to myself.
With ‘The Last Duel,’ I was so proud of it, and so honored to get to work with Ridley. I’d always wanted to do a period film. When I met my agent in London for the first time, I remember [her] sitting there going, ‘What is it you want to do?’ I essentially was just like, ‘I want to be Keira Knightley.’ I think that is what I literally said. So that was a huge moment for me, personally. So of course, to be a part of something like ‘Prima Facie,’ which is resonating in this way and has been nominated and won awards, is amazing. But I think if you just stay true to yourself, it’s easier to let that kind of thing slide over you.”
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.”
The actress said she hopes that the play continues to generate discussions around sexual assault and said the response so far has been “beautiful.”
That Jodie Comer should have received a nomination for her work in the solo show “Prima Facie,” a role that already won her Olivier and Evening Standard Theater awards, should have come as a surprise to no one. Except apparently Comer.
“I’m in shock,” she said from the back of a taxi late Tuesday morning.
In “Prima Facie,” which also earned nominations in three design categories, Comer plays Tessa, an ambitious young barrister who finds herself transformed after a colleague rapes her. With compassion, bold physicality and raw, febrile emotion, Comer enacts that assault and its aftermath eight times a week, standing in the stage rain (which the backstage crew has usually, though not always, warmed up) as Tessa struggles to gain a new perspective on her life and the law.
Comer said she hopes that the play continues to generate discussions around sexual assault and hopes that her nomination is in service of the many women she endeavors to represent. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
How do you feel?
We’ve been on such a journey with this play. I never dreamed that this would be a point that we would be at. So it just feels incredible. The response has been beautiful, and I just feel very, very grateful that so many on the team have been recognized as well. I can’t stress enough how much of a team effort this piece truly is.
On the night I saw the play, as it ended, I could hear several women weeping. Has the response here been any different than it was in London?
The only difference, I would say, has been to the humor. People find humor in different moments. But given the subject matter, which is so universal, the response has been very, very similar to the U.K. We’ve had a lot of people sending letters to us backstage, explaining their experiences watching the play and how it affected them. And we’ve had people reach out who came to see the play in London, and have also come to Broadway, expressing and confiding how their lives have changed within the past year. It feels like we can have the same conversation here.
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.