Drama fest set Comer on acting path
When Jodie Comer was 12 years old, she tried out for the annual drama festival in her native Liverpool, England. It was her first foray into acting outside the classroom.
“My drama teacher was entering people from our drama class, and she was like, ‘Do you wanna do it?’ I was like, ‘Yeah, OK!’ ” says Comer. “It was just an opportunity to put myself in a competition and win a medal, honestly.”
She wound up getting the medal, after performing a monologue about the Hillsborough disaster, a tragedy at a football match in Liverpool in 1989 that resulted in 97 deaths. That sent Comer on her acting path, and while there are still prizes, these days they’re much bigger.
Comer won an Emmy in 2020 for her breakthrough role as a psychotic assassin on the deliriously quirky British spy series “Killing Eve,” and this summer, she hit box office gold in the hit action comedy “Free Guy” — worldwide gross $327 million — starring opposite Ryan Reynolds as a video game developer and a character inside a video game world.
In the recently released “The Last Duel,” Ridley Scott’s 14th-century swords and shields epic, she stars alongside Matt Damon, Adam Driver and Ben Affleck. Comer’s brave performance has put the actor in the conversation for this year’s Oscars — a far way from her local Liverpool drama festival, but the latest step on her journey.
Comer plays Marguerite de Carrouges, who becomes the subject of a heated he-said, she-said accusation of rape in 1300s France. The film features a pair of intense depictions of sexual assault, told from two different perspectives,
which Comer says were handled extremely delicately on set by co-star Driver and director Scott.
“When we were shooting those scenes, as soon as (Scott) yelled, ‘Cut,’ he told everyone to get out of the room, and the three of us just kind of sat in there and discussed what it was that we’d found,” says Comer. “And then of course, we had to shoot it from either perspective.”
Marguerite’s viewpoint was shot first, in which she’s clearly the victim of rape, followed by that of Driver’s character, who takes Marguerite’s protests as playful come-ons.
While difficult to film, Comer found the end result of the experience professionally satisfying.
“(Filming) emotional things, and things in regards to rape in particular, there’s always a sensitivity to them, and you feel vulnerable and very exposed,” she says. “But I
feel like when you handle them correctly, you feel incredibly fulfilled afterwards.”
She’s able to draw parallels between that first monologue she did and the wrenching “Last Duel” scenes, and the relationship she’s able to form with affecting material.
“When I did that first piece, I was crying before I introduced my name,” Comer says. “It was always at the surface (with me), and I’ve always connected with those kinds of emotions.”
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