To her millions of global fans she is the star of Killing Eve, a psychopathic Russian assassin on a murderous world tour. In reality the 27-year-old actress still lives at home in Liverpool, in her old childhood bedroom, with her mum, dad and younger brother.
“I’ve never really thought of myself as a person whose job is first in every aspect of their life. And I was like, ‘Oh, wow, that is who I am.’ And you know what? I’m OK with that. That’s the life I choose to live.”
Killing Eve has made Comer hot property in Hollywood, but she has already been working for more than half her life. She was only 13 when she made her first appearance, in a radio play, then she went on to do all the usual soaps, followed by the 2015 BBC hit drama Doctor Foster, before her stunning performance as Villanelle in Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s spy thriller catapulted her into the big time. With a best actress Bafta and an Emmy under her belt, she had been halfway through filming a Ridley Scott movie alongside Matt Damon when the March lockdown grounded her. By then she had already co-starred with Ryan Reynolds in a big Disney movie, Free Guy, which will now be released next year. Last week she announced a new Channel 4 drama, co-starring Stephen Graham, set in a fictional Liverpool care home during the coronavirus crisis.
I arrive on a Soho hotel rooftop to find her unchaperoned by any publicist or agent, wearing jeans and trainers, clearing our table of dirty plates and glasses. Even though I’m prepared to hear her natural Scouse accent, it still takes me aback. She looks effortlessly stunning, but seems so unstarry that it takes me a few minutes to work out what she reminds me of. I’d been expecting either an earnest thespian or a glamorous starlet. What she radiates instead is the focus and self-belief of a professional athlete.
When I say so she looks pleased. The mindset of elite sport defined Comer’s early life: her father is a sports massage therapist for Everton FC, her brother is a sports performance analyst, and her best friend from school is the world-champion heptathlete Katarina Johnson-Thompson. The sense of “rightness” Comer describes feeling on set sounds a lot like what sports stars say about being “in the zone” — and her competitiveness is confirmed when she volunteers that she actually enjoyed having to audition for Free Guy. “There was still that thing of having to prove yourself, which I don’t mind at all.”
I wonder how she coped with the glitz and sycophancy of the LA Hollywood scene, but she seems entirely unfazed. “When people become hugely successful and find fame and they suddenly become monsters — I don’t think that’s a thing. I think you have to have that monster in you. I don’t think it changes people, I think people probably have certain tendencies, then when you get all this stuff given to you it multiplies everything by ten.” Had we met five years ago, she firmly maintains, her pre-celebrity self would have been identical to the one I meet today.
Immunity to the corrupting power of fame should sound like magical thinking, but in her case I believe her. “With agents and publicists I always gravitate to the people who don’t tell me what I want to hear. Everything is coming from a truthful place. That’s what I seek out and what I want.” I suspect what really distinguishes Comer from so many child stars who come a cropper, though, is her family.
“Happy” is the only word she can find to describe her childhood in Liverpool. Her parents’ marriage was similarly “happy”, as was her Catholic girls’ school, and so was she. In old family videos she was always hogging the camera, mimicking accents and showing off her impersonations, but she swears she wasn’t an “all singing, all dancing” stage-school type. She didn’t even go to drama school, and her best friends are still her brother and four girls she knew growing up.
She was horrified when a photographer once told her which half of her face was “your side”. She starts to laugh again. “I don’t know if I wanted to know that. That’s the last thing I want to be thinking about.” That degree of self-consciousness can “make you so narcissistic and so shallow”. She recalls once auditioning for Cinderella and thinking, “ ‘Oh I wish I was auditioning for the Ugly Sister.’ If there’s pressure on a character to be beautiful, it’s crippling because then you become so aware of what you look like. I guess I’ve always been lucky that a lot of the women I’ve played have been very nuanced.” As opposed to merely decorative? “Yeah, absolutely.”
The avatar she plays in Free Guy is the first role in which she had to strut about in leather trousers, and as she mimes thrusting her chest out, she starts to laugh. “My character’s like, ‘I’m here, I’m ready!’ But I have quite bad posture, I’m naturally like this” — she rounds her shoulders — “and they kept having to say, ‘Can you be more …’ ” — she arches her back again. “So I had to be much more aware of what I look like. Whereas I’d much rather do a role where I’m wearing no make-up.”
She doesn’t mind at all that lockdown has put paid to all the parties at which a young actress is expected to be seen. “I don’t go to celebrity events. I don’t want to be going somewhere just because there’s a bunch of famous people there who I could meet.” Is that about protecting her credibility as a serious actress? “No, I don’t think I’m guarding it consciously, I think that’s just innately who I am. It doesn’t interest me. The people I want to be with are my best mates from school. That’s my happy place.”
Even so, I say, isn’t it a bit odd still to be living at home at 27? “I know!” she agrees. “I’m definitely looking to move out.” But in the next breath she adds: “I’d live with my mum and dad till I was old and grey if I could.” So why move out? “Well, I recognise I need my own space and independence. I just don’t want to do it.” Her bedroom “doesn’t still have a single bed and Winnie-the-Pooh wallpaper”, she quickly clarifies. But she loves her mum’s home cooking and hasn’t a clue how to make a Sunday roast herself, so I wouldn’t bet on her moving out any time soon.
For many young stars the gap between their finances and those of childhood friends tend to widen to a point where the inequality makes intimacy unsustainable. When I ask if Comer’s wealth has become at all divisive, though, she looks amazed. “Oh my God, no! Money is not a thing for any of us. You know it’s incredible to be successful and earn good money for what you do, but it has never been what my happiness is valued on.”
There has, however, been a serious development in Comer’s private life. While filming Free Guy in Boston last year she was invited to a party where she met a man. For the first time in her life she fell in love.
She says so with the look of someone who is absolutely certain of her feelings. “Yeah,” she grins. “You know, I would never want to speak badly about people in my past, but yeah, this relationship feels very different. This feels like nothing else. When you actually feel it, you’re like, ‘Ahhh, so this is what it feels like!’ And it was special. I was away, it was the height of summer, I was doing this incredible job that was so much fun, it was my first time working in the States. So it was a lot of firsts.”
Her boyfriend works in tech and “isn’t in the public eye at all”, which suits her fine. She won’t name him, but he is widely reported to be James Burke, a 26-year-old lacrosse-playing Penn State University graduate from a wealthy New England family. The claims earlier this year that he is a registered Republican who follows Donald Trump on social media provoked uproar among some of Comer’s fans.
“Jodie Comer if you’re reading this, you can’t play a gay character and call yourself an ally when you’re dating a Republican, you disgusting piece of sh*t,” raged one. Another posted: “Jodie Comer dating a Trump supporter, while she’s portraying an LGBT character … is not only wrong but disgusting.” Unsurprisingly Comer has deleted all references to or photos of Burke on her social media.
He was photographed with her outside the Comer family home in Liverpool in the summer, but thanks to Covid he is mostly stuck in America and she is stuck here. “So it has been tricky.” He has to self-quarantine for 14 days if he visits, “so there’s a lot of facetiming. But it’s working! It’s good. It’s really good. It’s like with anything in life, if you want it enough you make it work.”
Comer has that elusive gift for making all her work look effortless. Not once in her company do I recognise a trace of Villanelle; later, when I rewatch Killing Eve, I simply cannot reconcile the woman on screen with the woman I met. Her mastery of accents feels more like ventriloquism than acting. As a beautiful blonde Scouser, Comer cannot count the number of times she has been underestimated by people in her industry, who expect talent to come with an RP accent and a public-school education. “And I really don’t mind,” she grins mischievously, “proving people wrong.”
She used to worry that she might only ever be a “television actress”, but if Free Guy was a test she set herself, she passed with flying colours. “When I got to set I realised, OK, this is huge, but the fundamentals of what it is that you do are actually the same.” I ask which actor’s career she dreams of emulating, and after pausing to think she names Julie Walters. With no disrespect to her fellow actress, I suspect Comer might be underestimating herself."