Free Guy: Jodie Comer on Ryan Reynolds’ best advice, Killing Eve’s final season and The Last Duel
Jodie Comer established herself as a leading lady on television’s Killing Eve. This year she hits the big screen with two major roles alongside the world’s most recognisable movie stars.
Jodie Comer’s laptop is lying to her. The actor squints disbelievingly at the screen, bringing her face – tousled, honey-golden hair tucked behind her ears, sparkling studs winking out – right up to the camera. “My laptop says it’s 6.07am, but that’s a big fat lie,” she frowns.
“It’s definitely not that early.” It is, in fact, a leisurely nine in the morning in New York, where Comer is doing press for Free Guy, the high-octane adventure movie that pairs her with Ryan Reynolds and Taika Waititi and is, somewhat astonishingly, also only her very first film role.
Let that settle in for a moment. Comer’s presence looms so large over popular culture, courtesy of her diabolical – and indelible – performance as Villanelle in Killing Eve, that you might be forgiven for thinking that she is one of those hybrid television and movie stars who effortlessly keeps one finger in the streaming pie and another in cinemas.
In fact, the Liverpool-born actor came up in the world of television before a boozy introduction to Phoebe Waller-Bridge at the BAFTAs segued into sparring with Sandra Oh in Waller-Bridge’s espionage comedy Killing Eve. Comer’s petulant, chaotic, Molly Goddard gown-wearing psycho killer is one of the great television characters of the past decade.
Now she’s preparing to say goodbye to Villanelle when the fourth and final season of Killing Eve wraps in London later this year. Comer is “terrified, honestly”, she admits.
“[It’s] bittersweet, but it’s also really exciting. I feel like the writers are enjoying the fact that they can take some risks.” Still, she senses the pressure that all beloved television series experience to stick the landing; it’s the finale curse, and nobody wants to be the next Game of Thrones. “It’s always the way, isn’t it?” Comer reflects. “We’ve been so lucky to be a part of something that was successful but also impacted and was so personal to people, and then it has to go. But I really hope we can give the fans an exciting way out.”
Comer’s homework for the next few weeks is to recalibrate her brain from film – one script, one director, one schedule – to the world of television, where basically anything goes, for many, many months. “It’s been so long since I’ve had eight scripts in front of me,” Comer admits. “I’ve still got to get my brain back into working at that kind of speed.”
If it feels like she has hurtled headfirst into cinema – first, with this month’s rollicking Free Guy and then with The Last Duel, no less than a medieval epic co-starring three men you might have heard of: Ben Affleck, Matt Damon and Adam Driver – it’s kind of the Comer way.
The actor auditioned for Free Guy in a daze, going straight from the set of Killing Eve to her meeting with Reynolds and director Shawn Levy of Stranger Things fame. She was completely exhausted, and spent the entire plane ride from London catastrophising about “all the possible things that could go wrong”, she recalls.
But there was something about Free Guy’s story – the tale of a guileless video game character called Guy (Reynolds), who discovers that he has the power of free will, and his relationship with Comer’s Millie, a terrifically cool programmer with confidence in her convictions.
The film felt special. Different. “And then I got to the audition and I met them and they were just so welcoming and so breezy and so energetic,” Comer says. “I remember thinking: ‘Oh god, I know who Ryan is, but he doesn’t know me.’ So do I say, ‘Hi, Ryan’? Or do I wait until he tells me he’s Ryan Reynolds? I was having all these stupid conversations in my head.” (By the way, not only did Comer get the job, but Reynolds has called her audition “like watching Meryl Streep in her first film role”.)
Reynolds is, Comer shares, as boisterous and engaging as he appears on screen. She loves his “fearlessness and his humility”, two things that served him well on Free Guy, which was largely stitched together from moments of improvised comedy.
Comer has “zero” experience in that area, she admits, her eyes widening in exaggerated horror. “Someone says improvisation and I run the other way,” she jokes. Reynolds gave her one piece of advice: Don’t be scared to look bad. “You’re going to try something and it may flop, and it may not be funny, and it may be a really bad idea – but then no one’s going to die,” Comer explains. “It’s not the end of the world. You can shrug it off and try something new.”
Free Guy contains a lot of comedy: both of the earnest, weaponised-charm variety that Reynolds has trademarked, as well as quite a lot of hoodie-wearing tech-bro disdain from Waititi’s gaming magnate character. Comer loved watching Waititi at work; there was one day when she stayed late because she couldn’t bear to miss a second of his performance.
“I was in awe. There was a take that was 10 minutes long!” she enthuses. Free Guy has a madcap energy, coupled with an expansive message to live life to its fullest, which is even more poignant given that the movie has endured several delays because of the pandemic.
“None of us had any idea what was going to happen last year, yet somehow this film really reflects on that,” Comer explains. “At the centre of it, it’s about the human condition. It’s about heart. It’s about all of us feeling, especially during the last year, that we have no control, right? There’s this beast above us and we’re all at the mercy of it. And then you watch this film where people take control, and they find their worth and their voice. I think that’s really beautiful, especially now.”
She first saw the movie last year – “I have goosebumps on my arm now, thinking about it,” she says – on a break from making The Last Duel, which had only just returned to production after a six-month hiatus. These two films are the beginning of the beginning for Comer’s movie-star era.
Free Guy, with its action-hero pedigree, is Comer’s first film; The Last Duel is her second, a serious – and very Oscar-y – historical drama, co-written by Damon, Affleck and Nicole Holofcener, about a medieval woman who accuses her husband’s best friend of rape. “I think it’s going to be really exciting and thought-provoking,” Comer shares.
Working with director Ridley Scott was “definitely a pinch-me moment”, Comer adds, as was collaborating with her A-list co-stars. “They really included me in the process of character and [asked] if there was dialogue that wasn’t working,” she recalls. “I felt like I really grew up on that set. But it was also probably the year. I think we all grew in some way, hopefully.”
When Covid shut down production, Comer was still green enough about the world of cinema to feel anxious that a Damon and Affleck reunion directed by Scott might never recommence. And then there was her added concern that, as someone who has been performing in one way or another for what feels like her whole life, she might not be able to do this thing that she loves for as long as the pandemic lasts.
Comer first began performing as a child, but not in an unspeakable, momager-managed way. “We were laughing about this yesterday, because Ryan was like: ‘People from the UK just come out of the womb in tap shoes’,” Comer jokes. “I feel like that’s what everyone says – ‘I was two and I liked Shakespeare.’”
But Comer has been a performer for so long, she isn’t sure what else there is. When she was 12, she enrolled in “an hour of singing, dancing and acting” on Saturdays, but dancing was taken off the table after an untimely growth spurt. “I was really long and I lost all my rhythm,” Comer says, extending her arm the length of her screen. “I was kind of like a cheese string.”
So Comer the dancer became Comer the actor, and she started going to auditions, got an agent, and everything fell into place. “I was always a very flamboyant child,” Comer remembers. “I definitely wasn’t shy. But often when people have asked me: ‘What did you want to do before you want to be an actress?’ … I was 12! I didn’t have any aspirations. I didn’t want to be anything. So I feel very fortunate – it’s hard work, a lot of it’s luck, and it’s also being in the right place at the right time and being surrounded by good people.”
Free Guy is in cinemas on August 12. The Last Duel is in cinemas on October 14
This article appears in the August issue of Vogue Australia, on sale now.