Jodie Comer’s Killing It

Jodie Comer is in a London apartment showing me the expression she makes after she’s killed someone and is “sucking in their soul.” I’m excited because my favorite thing about Comer is her face. Not just because it looks like it could be in the Louvre, but because of what she manages to do with that beautiful thing. The contortions she pulls off as the Gucci-clad assassin Villanelle on the BBC’s Killing Eve seemingly defy the pliability of skin, as if she were crafted from Silly Putty. In one frame, she’s an innocent porcelain doll; the next, she cracks a Cheshire Cat–esque grin; seconds later, she delivers a look of fearsome terror, before giving you a smile so disarming you don’t see her jab a hairpin in your eye. “I don’t even know what my face is doing half the time,” Comer says. “Sometimes I watch things back and I’m mortified because I feel like I’m doing something subtle, but my face is doing the opposite.”

So when I’m given the opportunity to stare at Comer’s face for an hour, I ask her to show me how it’s done. She’s the one who decides to start with the soul-sucking; she’s not sure why she went there—she’s filming the fourth and final season of Killing Eve, so perhaps Villanelle has seeped in. “You’ve killed someone and you’re like, ‘Yes!’—you’ve got the crazy eyes,” Comer explains, “which I think is simply that I don’t blink.” She encourages me to try the look out on my husband, before moving on to what she calls a “classic Villanelle”—immense boredom. “Eyes up to one side, eyebrows up a little,” she instructs. I call it her “unimpressed” face, and Comer agrees. “Yes, now we’re workshopping, I’m enjoying this,” she laughs. “She has a lot of disdain for things, so that’s a great Villanelle face.”

But now as Comer prepares to say goodbye to Villanelle (“she feels cemented in me, and it’s really sad to let her go”), she’s putting on a new face—that of a big-time Hollywood movie star. Comer is currently playing Marguerite in The Last Duel, a historical drama directed by Ridley Scott that tells the story of the last legally sanctioned duel in French history. The screenplay, written by Ben Affleck and Matt Damon—their first since Good Will Hunting—and Nicole Holofcener, the Oscar-nominated co-screenwriter of Can You Ever Forgive Me?, follows Marguerite as she accuses her husband’s best friend, played by Adam Driver, of rape; in turn, her husband, played by Matt Damon, challenges her attacker to a duel.

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What makes the screenplay unique, and Comer’s performance spectacular, is that the film is divided into three parts, with each part told from a different character’s perspective: her husband’s, her attacker’s, and the truth. “The whole movie hinged on Jodie’s ability to play her part in a way that was genuine, and also true to the perspective that the other characters had,” Affleck tells me.“That dance was so delicate, the line so fine, and the fact that she made it look so effortless is the most impressive feat of acting I’ve seen in a long, long time.” (“I’m just proud to be a footnote in the Wikipedia page of her career,” he adds.)

Holofcener, who wrote Marguerite’s point of view, says the film is “the story of a hero.” “It’s not about the rape, it’s about what she did about it,” she says. And while the film may be set in 14th-century France, its themes are as applicable today as ever. “People keep saying, ‘Oh, it’s just so relevant,’ and I’m like, That’s so sad, because we could say that for every period in history,” Comer says. “There’s never been a decade when a woman hasn’t spoken her truth and been shamed for it.”

It was important to Comer to do justice to Marguerite’s story. “A great actor is like that,” Damon says. “She’d say, ‘I don’t feel like I should say this’ and we’d make the change. We took every one of her notes.” Damon says he left feeling indebted to Comer. “As a writer, the gratitude you have for an actor who makes your stuff that much better is this indescribable, wonderful feeling,” he says. “I can’t be hyperbolic enough in talking about Jodie. She’s truly incredible. Directors are going to be beating down her door because she’s a generational talent.”

Her role in The Last Duel, as well as her performance opposite Ryan Reynolds in last summer’s Free Guy, marks the beginning of a new chapter in Comer’s career. “I’ve grown so much on this job, especially in regard to finding my own voice,” she says of Killing Eve. “Now as I’m stepping into this new world, I feel more ready and aware, and like all my ideas aren’t complete and utter rubbish. It’s really given me confidence in myself.” When she thinks about how far she’s come from her childhood in Liverpool (where she learned accents by mimicking TV commercials as a child and still stays with her parents when she’s not filming), Comer remembers being 17 and meeting with a potential agent, who asked her what she wanted to do. “I was obsessed with Keira Knightley and I was like, ‘I want to be in period films. I want to be in costume dramas.’ Then I had this moment on set last year when I thought, I’m here.”

Hair by Halley Brisker for Color Wow; Makeup by Alex Babsky for Noble Panacea; Manicure by Michelle Class for Dior Vernis; Produced by Bob Ford; Photographed on location at the Ritz London.

This article appears in the November 2021 issue of ELLE.

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