Jodie Comer on Killing Eve, nude scenes and honing her mothering skills in her new apocalyptic thriller (Picture: Getty)
She was brilliant as a psychopathic assassin in Killing Eve.
Now the proudly Liverpudlian actress Jodie Comer shows her more nurturing side as a mum on the run from a watery apocalypse in new thriller The End We Start From.
In this weekend’s 60 Seconds, the 30-year-old tells us all about braving nude scenes, never doing more Killing Eve and why she’s terrified of babies.
You’re back in a new movie. What’s it all about?
The End We Start From is based on a book by Megan Hunter. It follows a young woman who gives birth at the beginning of the movie while London is simultaneously hit with extreme rain and flooding. She and the baby are forced to leave the city. No more spoilers!
It has been called a ‘career-defining’ performance. Who is your character?
I play ‘Woman’. A unique thing about this film is that none of the characters have names, apart from the baby, who’s called Zeb. ‘Woman’ is like an everyday hero. And I think there are a lot of people who will be able to see themselves, or people they know, within her.
What she achieves and gets through is so mighty. But she isn’t this kind of superhero figure, doing all these kind of unbelievable feats like scaling walls.
It just feels very rooted within reality and within the human psyche and emotion. And I find that extremely compelling.
There’s a graphic birth scene, including where the camera goes ‘down there’. Was that daunting?
Jodie didn’t want to shy away from the brutality of motherhood in The End We Start From (Credits: Everett/Shutterstock)
One of the many reasons I wanted to work with the director, Mahalia Belo, is that she didn’t want to shy away from the beauty but also the brutality of labour and motherhood, and all these kinds of complex emotions that you can have with your own body. How you change fundamentally as a person.
There was quite a bit of nudity within the script but for me it was always very clear why it was there and I was comfortable with that. It’s incredibly raw but it feels to me like a real celebration of what it is to be female. It’s not always easy and it’s not always pretty, but it’s very real.
Which is harder – acting with a newborn baby or pretending to act with a baby?
Luckily, the babies get a break (Credits: Everett/Shutterstock)
It’s harder to act pretending to be with a baby. I’m not a mother, and the first babies I met were eight weeks old and tiny. My hands were visibly shaking.
I remember thinking, ‘Oh my God, what have I done? This is terrifying.’ And then slowly, as we filmed, I became more comfortable. The babies had to have a break every 20 minutes – rightly so.
But it meant you could be on one shot and the baby’s looking at you in a way that kind of lights you up and gives you something spontaneous and then has to go on a break and it’s, ‘OK, now you have to do it with a doll’. And you have to try to summon that same emotion, which feels really artificial.
So Mahalia gave me this doll to take home. She was like, ‘I want you to walk around the house, put the washing on, make yourself a cup of tea, all while you’re holding the baby’.
How do you think you’d cope in a real apocalypse?
I don’t think I’d cope very well at all in a real one.
But, as The End We Start From explores, the truth is sometimes that when you’re faced with adversity, or you’re in a situation like this or something else, I think it’s surprising what you can kind of summon within yourself. So maybe I’d surprise myself.
‘Woman’ is a everyday hero (Credits: Everett/Shutterstock)
The Personal Life section on your Wikipedia entry simply states: ‘Comer is known for guarding her private life and relationships’. Who put that in there?
I don’t know.
How do you cope with being a celebrity?
Despite being a ‘celebrity’ , Jodie lives a very normal life (Credits: PA)
It’s fine. It’s funny. When I hear ‘celebrity’, I’m like, ‘Ugh!’ It makes my skin crawl a bit because I don’t see myself as that. I live a very normal life, do you know what I mean? I’m still in the same circles of friends and I love going to the pub and all that kind of stuff. So it’s fine.
As I see it, you just have to share what you want to share and keep private what you want to keep private.
Do you have a mantra for when the going gets tough?
Jodie Comer and Ryan Reynolds in Free Guy (Credits: AP)
When I was doing my movie Free Guy [with Ryan Reynolds] I went to Capitol Records in LA to record this song. It was terrifying. I recorded one version of it and this guy’s voice came over the loudspeaker and he was like, ‘Jodie, I’m just gonna give you a little note that we say within the music industry.’
And I was like, ‘OK’. And he said, ‘If you think, you stink!’ And I think it’s true. Like, with anything. The moment you overthink or are in your head too much or trying to control, it is the moment when you take yourself off course. You kind of get in your own way. And it’s a quick one, you know? ‘You think, you stink.’
Do you miss playing Villanelle in Killing Eve?
She’s content with never doing more Killing Eve (Picture: Copyright: BBCAmerica)
Do I miss her? I’ll always miss her. But I do think the show had to come to an end. I don’t long to come back for another series and revisit her.
I feel like I did all I could with her. And that’s a nice feeling – to come away from it with a sense of kind of contentment.
The End We Start From is out in cinemas.
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We spend 60 Seconds with acclaimed actor Jodie Comer