Jodie’s making a killing as a villainess
The natural talent stays grounded as her career takes off
s flamboyant, seductive psychopath Villanelle on the hit TVNZ 2 drama KillingEve, actress Jodie Comer is a natural at behaving badly. She knocks children’s ice creams off their cones, steals people’s luggage and has some very creative methods of murder.
But when the director calls “cut” and the cameras stop shooting, don’t expect Jodie to know one end of a poison bottle from the other.
“I am so clumsy,” the self-described “big softie” confesses. “If you could see me on set, trying to use a flick knife … remember that shot of me flipping a knife out in the bathroom? It must have been about 15 takes.”
Luckily for Jodie, when TV executives were looking for someone to fill the role of beautiful, conniving, highfashion-wearing assassin Villanelle, being handy with a knife was last on the list of attributes they were seeking. More important was a vulnerable boldness that, as it turned out, Jodie could manufacture in spades.
She was so convincing, in fact, that the 26-year-old took out the gong for Best Actress at the BAFTA TV awards in May, which is quite a feat for someone with no formal acting training!
While her co-star Sandra Oh had already carved out a name for herself on longrunning US medical drama
Grey’sAnatomy, Jodie was a virtual unknown when she landed the role that catapulted her to global stardom.
Talentquest
Growing up in Liverpool, her first foray into acting came at the age of 12, as a result of being kicked out of a girl group for missing rehearsals. Suddenly in need of something else to contribute to her school talent show, she performed an emotional monologue about a girl whose father had died in the 1989 Hillsborough sports stadium disaster.
Her delivery was so powerful that she won the competition and her teacher put her forward for a BBC radio play – her first acting job.
More small roles followed ed and, at 21, Jodie’s profile went up a notch when she e landed the role of Kate, a 20-something woman who has an affair with her parents’ friend in the hit revenge drama DoctorFoster. “Everyone hated her!” laughs Jodie. So much so they accosted her in bars.
Her role in DoctorFoster was just a taste of what was to come, although she didn’t know it. At one point, she went seven months being turned down at auditions and worried she wouldn’t land another part again.
Then, when Jodie suddenly found herself in the running for the role of Villanelle, she read the script and feared it wasn’t for her.
“I thought, ‘Ah, f***. I’m not an assassin – the stereotype of what a female assassin is,” she says. “And I felt a bit deflated … but I related to Villanelle.”
After a first audition in London, she flew to Los s Angeles to meet Sandra, 47, and they “found that little spark” that was vital for the bizarre push-pull relationship between Jodie’s character and Sandra’s character Eve Polastri, who Villanelle wants to both love and kill.
One of the most challenging aspects was mastering Villanelle’s many accents, from Russian to French to upper-crust Brit. Surprisingly, she confesses she’s not a natural but, “I have an incredible voice coach who is always on set with me, keeping me in check. I do thrive on the challenge.”
As for the success of the genre-defying show, the rest
is history, and the born-andbred Liverpudlian – who’s now filming action comedy FreeGuy alongside star Ryan Reynolds, and is also set to star alongside WonderWoman’s Gal Gadot in the remake of Agatha Christie’s Death ontheNile – was in tears when she found herself accepting her BAFTA.
“As soon as they said my name, I pulled my really ugly crying face,” she grimaces. “I felt like, oh God, I’m such a cliché. I had to pick my dress up because it was too long and I was going up the steps crying.
” Together with her at the glitzy event were her parents and brother Charlie – she might be an award-winning TV star, but she still lives at home and loves watching telly in her pyjamas – and the tightknit foursome “were still up at 6am drinking champagne”.
Her dad, a sports massage therapist, and mum, who works in a travel agency, then hopped on a train back to Liverpool – and they took Jodie’s statue with them for safekeeping. “My dad had it out on the train and this woman said, ‘Is that the real thing?’ He said, ‘Yeah, do you want to touch it?’ They took it on a pub crawl. They were so proud.”