Evening Standard - ES Magazine
GOOD RIDDANCE TO BAD RUBBISH?
London’s streets are cleaner and sheenier than they’ve ever been. But whether that’s a good thing or not, Richard Godwin isn’t so sure
I’m considering running for mayor. Slogan: ‘Make London Filthy Again.’ It will be a short, sharp, singleissue campaign aimed at mobilising the unhygienic vote. Time to get back to basics: rats, squalor, decay. Muck the place up a bit. Okay, it might not have the same purchase as ‘Take Back Control’ or ‘Make America Great Again’. And I can see that, in the light of a not-very-amusing global pandemic and an ongoing air-quality crisis, my plans for unleashing a cloacal stench over Knightsbridge and lovingly restoring the Great Dustheap of Somers Town might seem a little distasteful. Irresponsible, even. But better out than in, I say. And my plans for re-filthing Oxford Street (replacing the concrete with mud, releasing a few wild pigs) would be a demonstrable improvement. Restoring a few Thameside tanneries and slaughterhouses might be a good way of capitalising on the post-Brexit regulatory landscape, too. From Rotting Swill Gate to Pest Ham, from Spew Gardens to Cockfesters, the whole city can wallow in its own crapulence, no longer ashamed of its essential functions.
Okay. I’ll come clean. I have no desire to be Mayor (though I am a journalist and I am a liar — so, I guess I’m qualified?). But for sincerity fans: I am in favour of masks and hand-washing and against disease and bin juice. It’s just that as I walk around the nervous, contactless, disinfected post-pandemic London, I can’t help feeling that the place has had some of its basic essence scrubbed away. Without their usual flow of people, gleaming new business precincts such as Victoria Street and Broadgate Circle resemble those chilly computer-generated images that are used to market London property to international investors. Even the Tube is unnervingly pleasant these days. I find myself pining for the mucky city I remember as a kid, with its newsprint smears and its squirming abundance before it was all USB ports, hand sanitiser and choux buns. I fear for our collective immune system. We need some municipal sauerkraut — some good bacteria.
I am, admittedly, feeling the after-effects of Sam Byers’s repulsive and yet magnificent London novel, Come Join Our Disease — just out in paperback and a fun thing to read on
the Tube. It’s about a woman, Maya, who rebels against society’s constant injunctions towards wellness and productivity and decides to ‘lean into’ illness and decay instead. Her epiphany comes on a commuter train when she is moved to stick her finger into the space between two train seats and lick off the accumulated grime. ‘London came upon my senses like a glorious illness,’ she says. ‘You know you are there, I’ve always thought, even before you’ve seen anything of the city. It has its own atmospheric signature, its own distinct patina of grime. My lungs, my skin, sensitised by the retreat, welcome this sense of return.’ What she tastes is: ‘Life! Teeming life!’
While I’m not tempted to follow Maya’s lead and start uploading the contents of my toilet bowl to Instagram, the book has made me appreciate the ‘distinct patina’ of London again. There’s a reason London’s 21st-century soundtrack is called ‘grime’. And that ‘Waterloo Sunset’, the most beautiful of all London songs, begins with the word: ‘Dirty’. Most capitals paint their offices of state white. Downing Street is black. Why? Well, the bricks were originally yellow but they became so besmirched over the years they turned black. Everyone preferred them that way so that’s how they are.
Indeed, visitors have marvelled at our squalor for centuries. Look up any ‘Why is London so dirty’ thread on the Q&A site Quora and try not to beam with pride (and also howl at the racism of some answers). London’s dirtiness has traditionally been a great source of ingenuity and invention. It was the Great Stink of 1858 (excrement piling up in the
“THE THING ABOUT DIRT IS, IT’S HONEST. IT’S OUR TRUTH. AND IT’S WHAT WE HAVE IN COMMON”
Thames) that inspired the greatest feat of Victorian engineering: Sir Joseph Bazalgette’s sewer. And up until the mid19th century, too, London’s waste was a great source of treasure. Charles Dickens describes London’s great dust heaps in his last novel, Our Mutual Friend (1864), huge, manmade mountains of rubbish that provided livelihoods for thousands, and a fortune for his character, Noddy Boffin. As historian Lee Jackson writes in his book Dirty Old London, almost everything Londoners threw away could be repurposed: ashes and cinders were turned into bricks; food waste became fertiliser; dead cats made pretty fur stoles.
Since then, London’s cleanliness levels have fluctuated as industries have risen and fallen. However, I’d trace the most recent wave of cleanliness back to the late 1990s, when our lovely old power stations started being repurposed as clean, white art galleries — and London really started selling itself as an international centre of business and finance. This became especially noticeable around the 2012 Olympics: old stone buildings were scrubbed clean, undesirables were moved on and luxxy new apartments started popping up everywhere. More recently, the filtered-fashions of the influencer age have introduced levels of fastidiousness that wouldn’t have lasted very long in the seamier, grimier London of not-so-long ago. And yet it’s surely no coincidence that during its great sanitisation effort, London has become the favoured ‘laundromat’ of autocrats, criminals and plunderers the world over, a place to turn ‘dirty money’ into gleaming Belgravia property portfolios. The more benignly hygienic London has appeared on its surface, the harder it has worked to scrub out its secrets.
Meanwhile, we throw away more and more. It’s just that our rubbish has become a sort of global every-rubbish. In his book Londoners (2011), the writer Craig Taylor interviewed a street-sweeper named Joe, who identified the most common item of London litter as… the McDonald’s cup. ‘That’s all you find everywhere. That’s the biggest item, McDonald’s cups, chip cartons, burgers… Anything with a logo, it’s the big M most of the time.’ I suspect the same would be true in New York, Munich, Rio de Janeiro, Moscow.
Dirt is, in the anthropologist Mary Douglas’s famous description, ‘matter out of place’. ‘Dirty’ is more often than not a moral judgement as much as a physical description; and immigrants, women, the working class, homosexuals and gender non-conforming people are more than likely to be on the wrong end of those judgements. And yet what we consider dirty rarely stays the same.
While the pandemic has brought on a hygienic hyper-vigilance, isolation has also made us crave the opposite. Bodies. Sweat. Intimacy. Messiness. According to the New York trend forecaster Sean Monahan (he’s the one who coined the term ‘normcore’) we are in the process of a ‘vibe shift’, a once-in-a-quinquennium event that will see everything that was fashionable five minutes ago become deeply unfashionable five seconds from now. The way Monahan sees it, the ‘vibe’ since the political upheavals of 2016 has been defined by an alliance of ‘woke’ politics and streetwear. Clean-eating. Clean-thinking. Removing every last speck of smirch from your limited-edition Dior x Adidas sneakers with a wet wipe and every last unclean thought from your social media feeds.
The era we are moving towards, he reckons, is one of ‘messy hair and messy make-up’, decadence, anti-productivity and a strong death-drive. Balenciaga has been selling £1,300 hoodies full of moth holes; ‘the haute mess’ is, according to Elle magazine, the look du jour, scuffed, slovenly, maybe just a tiny bit stinky. If so, it is a vibe shift that really ought to play to London’s squalid strengths. An early harbinger is the much-discussed Instagram account @IndieSleaze, which fetishises a ‘decadent’ near-London past of Trash, the Libertines playing in someone’s filthy flat, unflattering flash photography and everyone looking rather gorgeously wasted. You can almost feel the stranger’s breath on your cheek. Is that a whiff of toilet? Lovely.
And the thing about dirt is, it’s honest. It’s our truth. And it’s what we have in common. As Maya reflects, as she breathes in all her fellow commuters in Come Join Our Disease: ‘I wanted, quite suddenly, for all of us to smell together, eat together, sweat together. It bothered me that we were wearing clothes.’ The urge is not sexual, she reflects. ‘It was a craving for a different kind of contact, a recognition that all the things that repelled us about each other were all the things we had in common.’
Last month, Jodie Comer was in a studio to record her last bits of dialogue for the final ever episode of Killing Eve. ‘It was surreal,’ she says, eyes wide. ‘They had this sofa in the centre of the screen, so I sat there and asked them to play me the final moments. I was like… wow.’
We’re meeting for breakfast in a Mayfair members’ club the day before her 29th birthday. Comer is not having a party though. Last weekend she had a family dinner in Liverpool (the tasting menu at Röski, which she recommends as ‘it lasts about three hours so you really have time to catch up’) and, on the day, she is going to see Small Island
at the National Theatre with a friend. As she tucks in to overnight oats and an espresso, I dig for spoilers of the Killing Eve finale. Many are hoping Eve and Villanelle will get together and go off into the sunset. ‘Yeah, I mean…’ she laughs, with a raised eyebrow.
But then again, the show is literally called Killing Eve,
which doesn’t bode well for Eve. ‘Well, you’d think that, but is it ‘Killing’ Eve? Or is it Killing ‘Eve’ ?’ she asks, mysteriously. ‘Eve’s changed so much, especially in this series. I was like whoa, Sandra!’
Villanelle is, of course, Russian. Which, in series one, felt kind of retro Cold War but now feels much darker. Continuing to live our normal lives — in my case, chatting to an actor — with pictures of Ukrainian devastation on every front page is a strange business. ‘Everything else is so insignificant,’ says Comer. ‘The world right now is extremely sinister. Russian people are being fed so much misinformation. It’s terrifying when you realise there are people in power who have the ability to do that, and choose to do that. And the number of people who are none the wiser.’
The show won Comer an Emmy and a Bafta, and launched her in Hollywood. Last year she starred in Free Guy with Ryan Reynolds and The Last Duel with Matt
Damon and Adam Driver. But her new role is more low-key: Prima Facie is a one-woman play about a barrister who defends rapists, before becoming a victim herself. She pulled out of Ridley Scott’s new film, Napoleon, to do it (that role will now be played by Vanessa Kirby).
‘That decision was actually taken out of my hands,’ she admits. ‘The scheduling kept changing, and I was always committed to the play. So it came to a point where it was impossible to do both.’ It’s safe to assume that one of those jobs is significantly better paid than the other, and she could have pulled out of the play to take the money.
‘Ha! Yeah,’ she laughs, ‘but I never got into this for the pay cheque. I’m going to grow so much from this experience. Sometimes opportunities present themselves and you’re like, if I say no, it will be purely out of fear. If I said no to this because I was scared and then they announced another actress, I’d want to punch myself in the face.’
Comer threw herself into research, speaking to barristers and a Rasso (rape and serious sexual offences) officer. ‘It’s been amazing because Napoleon fell through, but I’ve had this time to speak to people who have been so open and honest,’ she says. ‘They care so much about what they’re doing, but it’s very evident that the system doesn’t work for women. If a woman reports being raped, it’s her who’s on trial. She’s given this burden of responsibility to prove what happened.’
Thirty tickets at each performance will be available at a ‘pay what you can’ price, something Comer feels strongly about, telling me ‘theatre shouldn’t be this exclusive club. That’s so wrong.’ She is aware of the privilege that gave many in her industry a leg-up, and talks of the twist of fate that introduced her to Stephen Graham. They met on 2012’s Liverpool-set drama Good Cop, and he introduced her to his agent. Comer and Graham worked together again last year
“IF I SAID NO BECAUSE I WAS SCARED AND THEN THEY ANNOUNCED ANOTHER ACTRESS, I’D WANT TO PUNCH MYSELF IN THE FACE”
“ONE THING THAT I FIND DEEPLY SATISFYING IS DOING A GOOD FOOD SHOP — I LOVE AN M&S”
“SO MUCH IS OUT OF YOUR CONTROL SO THE PARTS OF YOUR LIFE THAT YOU CAN CONTROL BECOME SACRED”
on Help, a Channel 4 drama set in a care home during the first lockdown, and a rare outing for her real (Scouse) accent. ‘I’d never done a project like that before, which is political and really raw because many people were still living through it,’ she says. ‘We really felt the weight of how important it was.’
It is testament to her transformative ability that playing a Liverpudlian care worker doesn’t feel at odds with the Comer we see on the red carpet or in a fashion shoot like the one on the cover of this magazine. ‘I sent over a plethora of young Meryl Streep images,’ she laughs of the mood board for this shoot. ‘They were pared back, very simple, which I really enjoyed. It’s important to me now to feel comfortable. I said to my stylist, Elizabeth [Saltzman, who also works with Gwyneth Paltrow], as we moved out of lockdown: it’s great to wear fabulous clothes that you wouldn’t usually wear, but actually I want to be comfortable and look back on those moments and see that.’
Today she’s wearing workout clothes — a black T-shirt and leggings — because ‘my iron’s broke and everything else is scrunched up’. Comer’s style revelation wasn’t the only change of the past couple of years. ‘We were all forced to pause and evaluate what’s really meaningful to us,’ she says. ‘I realised I love being at home and enjoy simpler things. Like having my close friends, not feeling the need to be certain places and please certain people. I grew up a lot. I really stepped into myself. I’ve got calmer and more secure in who I am. I mean,’ she adds hastily, ‘I’ve by no means got it all sussed out. That’s a lifelong thing.’
Comer and her family are tight. As we talk, she plays with a large heart-shaped Loquet locket; a gift from her mum, Donna. ‘It has amethyst in it, and a little moon charm. I have a habit of fiddling with it when I’m nervous.’ She has said in the past that she would like to live at home in Liverpool with Donna and her dad, Jimmy, until she is ‘old and grey’. But now she has a place in London where I assume she lives with her boyfriend, the American lacrosse player James Burke, but I can’t say for sure because she never talks about that side of her life.
‘It’s increasingly important to manage those things,’ she says carefully. ‘So much is out of your control so the parts of your life that you can control become really sacred.’ I’m impressed that they avoid ever being papped. ‘If I go to a party, I want to be in my mate’s living room listening to Fall Out Boy on a playlist of early 2000s hits,’ she says. ‘That’s where I’m letting my hair down, not at an event where I’m seen leaving. That terrifies me.’
As she approaches her 30s, she has also learned to care less about what other people think. No small feat in her job, where you are relentlessly presented with other people’s opinions. ‘I’ve got a different outlook on what success is,’ she explains. ‘Now it comes down to how I feel when I come home from a day’s work. If I feel proud of myself. I’m much better at not putting that on the opinions of others, because I did for a really long time.’
Was there a turning point? ‘You just become aware of your habits…. I was seeking a lot of approval and my happiness was dependent on it, then I realised how shit that made me feel.’ Is it things like stepping back from social media and not reading reviews? ‘Yeah. If I’m doing a job for me then, whatever the reaction may be, I can say, okay that’s unfortunate, however I gained X, Y and Z from this.’ (Despite the Scouse accent, she says ‘zee’ rather than ‘zed’.) Not that Comer has experienced many bad reviews. Even mixed reviews of the last season of Killing Eve fell over themselves to say that she remained amazing. There was a brief attempt to ‘cancel’ her on social media, when it was rumoured her boyfriend was a Republican. Regardless of her boyfriend’s political views, I don’t think anyone — particularly a person involved in projects such as Help and Prima Facie — should be bullied into proving their liberal credentials.
I ask the name of her favourite WhatsApp group and she replies instantly: ‘Me and my best mates from school are all over the place, so it’s called Hoes in Different Area Codes.’ She laughs uproariously. ‘It’s Katarina [Johnson-Thompson], she’s an Olympic athlete so she’s always away training. My friend Charlotte is an artist, she lives in Spain. Then my other friends are in Liverpool. We managed to get together for a weekend last year and it was amazing. Friends are such medicine. The person that you can fall into being when you’re in their company is just so pure. I mean, the title of our WhatsApp group isn’t pure!’
When Comer talks about her friends and family, she glows with warmth. Perhaps this solid background is the secret to her success because she says the energy you bring to an audition is vital. She doesn’t have to audition much these days, but she remembers the anxiety of her early career, when she had been on Holby City and Waterloo Road but wasn’t continuously working so got a job in Tesco. ‘There were a couple years where I’d done acting jobs, but also I needed money to go out at the weekend with my friends,’ she smiles. ‘I was on the tills on the Saturday/ Sunday shift, so was hungover 99.9 per cent of the time.’
I sympathise, having worked on a checkout at the same age, but in Waitrose. ‘Oh, you’re so fancy!’ Her face lights up again. ‘I was trying to explain Waitrose to my boyfriend the other day. He said, “Is that like Whole Foods?” I told him it’s not as fancy as Whole Foods, but it’s fancy.’ It’s fancier than Tesco, but not as fancy as M&S? ‘I love an M&S,’ she sighs dreamily. ‘One thing that I find deeply satisfying is doing a good food shop.’
And this is the real Jodie Comer: texting her mates, hanging out with her boyfriend, doing a big food shop and, today, dealing with a broken iron. ‘I called my mum and she said it’s the fuse, so I’m going fuse shopping now,’ she laughs. ‘So rock ’n’ roll.’
The final season of ‘Killing Eve’ is on BBC iPlayer now. ‘Prima Facie’ is at the Harold Pinter Theatre from 15 Apr to 18 Jun (haroldpintertheatre.co.uk)