Article from The Australian.

She steals the show as the sexy, deadly star of Killing Eve. And Jodie Comer couldn’t be happier.

Jodie Comer recalls being ­starstruck three times, and this trio, it’s fair to say, are a rum bunch: Helen Mirren, newsreader ­Trevor McDonald and the bloke who played Sinbad in the old British soap Brookside, which was based in Liverpool. Now, you might find it easy to rank these, but the 26-year-old breakout star of last year’s breakout hit, the comic thriller Killing Eve, isn’t so sure. After all, spotting Sinbad was a big deal for the young Comer, who is a proud Scouser to the core; and she didn’t even dare go up to the ITN news legend when she ­spotted him at an awards ceremony. “Do you know what I mean?” she says in her broad Liverpool accent, of which there’s no trace in the show. “It’s not every day you see ­Trevor McDonald!”

It is fair to say, though, that Mirren might have had the most impact, and not just because Dame Helen knew who Comer was, too. “She said, ‘I know, I feel exactly the same,’ and hugged me,” the younger actress says now, still a little shocked. It’s Mirren’s career that Comer has in her sights, and, after Killing Eve, it looks entirely feasible.

In the series, she is Villanelle, the witty, scary assassin engaged in a drawn-out, long-distance, surprisingly sexy game of cat-and-mouse with said Eve, played by Sandra Oh. Before it aired, it very much seemed an Oh vehicle, but Comer, with her accents and personas, stole the show — and even our hearts, which is pretty good going given that she tends to kill at least one person per episode. At this month’s BAFTA awards she was crowned best actress, defeating a star line-up including Oh, and the show won best drama series. “I guess what’s interesting about Killing Eve is that you’re constantly switching between these two women,” Comer says. “I feel like neither of them is good or bad, nothing’s black or white. Sometimes you strangely agree with Villanelle, and sometimes you go, ‘Eve, why did you do that?’”

Well, yes. The ambiguities are a huge part of the attraction; the amorality is great fun. Still, ­Villanelle is bad, isn’t she? Comer laughs. “Yes, she is. Sorry, I’m always excusing her! No, she’s bad,” she says, as though having to remind herself of it. She has a habit of defending Villanelle. “What I loved about the violence in the show was that a lot of it was suggested; you didn’t see it,” she said last year. “Some of it was gruesome. There was a lot of humour in it, or artistry. I don’t know if this is the Villanelle in me, defending what she does.”

The worrying thing is that the scheming ­Villanelle is a logical role for Comer. She’s already been the best of frenemies in the comedy series My Mad Fat Diary; the young marriage buster in Doctor Foster; and a scheming queen in The White Princess. “My friends from school used to say, ‘Why don’t you ever play normal?’” she laughs.

In person, Comer has a striking heart-shaped face and big, expressive eyes that can switch from playful to murderous in a blink. She wears jeans and a loose blue-and-white-striped shirt, which she says apologetically was the last thing she had left in her suitcase (home, if she’s ever home, is still her parents’ place). Most of the time she’s relaxed and giggly, then now and again she’ll swing into action, put on an accent and clown — in other words, turn it on. The week after our interview, she’s off to film a comedy in Hollywood with Ryan Reynolds, and she’ll do the third series of Eve after that. But when I suggest everything must have changed for her in the past year, she is cautious. “Do you know what? It’s not a drastic change, but there’s definitely been a shift.” She had a “really weird experience” recently in the US, where she had to get a 4am flight. “I got to the airport, it must have been half two, and there were… men waiting for me to sign things,” she says awkwardly. “They’d been following us around doing press during the week. Whoa. When does it become normal for strange men to be waiting for you at the airport?”

On the other hand, there are times when she can’t get men to approach her for love nor money. How has the love life been? “Oh, zero, darling, zero,” she says, suddenly a bit Joan Collins. “I don’t know if it’s particularly because I’ve played a ­psychopath. I really don’t get approached at all. Which is fine,” she adds, kind of convincingly. “I’m never in one place long enough.”

In many ways, playing Villanelle has been ­liberating for Comer. “I feel she’s made me a lot more honest with myself — with my relationships and how I feel.” She was encouraged in this by the show’s creator, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who wrote the first series (as well as writing and starring in another hit show, Fleabag). “Phoebe is pretty fearless,” Comer says. The audition process was made a bit easier by the fact that months before Killing Eve appeared on the horizon, the pair got trashed at a Baftas afterparty in Comer’s hotel room. When she later got the call to audition, she panicked. “I was, like, ‘What did I say? What did I do? Was I doing weird dance moves?’”

Waller-Bridge did not write series two (now showing on ABC TV and iview) because of work commitments; actor and writer Emerald Fennell has taken over. The tone remains the same, though. Suffice to say that “Villanelle and Eve come into contact more”, Comer says, “but in very different circumstances. And we just explore this kind of impossible relationship. Because we know what the audience wants — but could that, would that, ever happen?” What is it the audience wants? “They want them to… you know what,” she smiles. I ask her to spell it out.

“Villanelle is definitely sexually attracted to Eve. But there are so many other ­elements to what that relationship is. It’s funny, because I find that every viewer has a different experience with the character. I’ve heard people say it’s maternal.” She screws her face up at that idea. Neither Oh nor she has a full answer to this one, and that’s the joy of it. A lot of people can relate to it, she thinks, ­specifically the strange “cross-wire of emotions” that aren’t easily categorised. “In life, we do have those relationships where we think, ‘What is this?’ It’s very truthful in that sense.”

Comer didn’t achieve stardom by the usual route. Her father is a massage therapist for ­Everton football club; her mother works for a transport company. She has one adored younger brother. What’s it like for them to see her playing ­Villanelle? “They love it,” she beams. Are they surprised? “I don’t think they are,” she says dryly. “They’ve put up with me for long enough.”

As a kid she was always mucking about doing accents and impressions at home, being “a drama queen”. There are no actors in the family, but there was her nanna Frances, who was the life and soul. “She always used to say, ‘Oh, you get it from me, you do,’” she says fondly. Nanna Frances died just as she was filming the first series of Killing Eve.

In an odd way, Comer thinks it freed her. Much is made of the famous scene with her in a frilly pink dress; what is less known is that she filmed it just after she’d been to Frances’s funeral. Coming back on set, something clicked; she finally found her Villanelle. It was also then, though, that she realised Frances was right: she did get it from her. “It was that bittersweet thing of saying, ‘I wish I could say it to you now, and I can’t.’”

She is, in one sense, aggressively down-to-earth. “People always ask me what my hobbies are when I’m not filming,” she says. “I don’t have any hobbies. I like to go and drink gin with my friends, and I like to dance.” She has never done an acting course and isn’t really sure you can even teach acting. Did she grow up feeling that she could do anything?

“Do you know what?” she ponders. “I think I must have always believed in myself, because I’ve had conversations with people on nights out, and they’re, like, ‘Oh, so you think you’re gonna be in films, do ya?’ And I’m, like, ‘Yeah!’” She laughs. “And you feel big-headed, but if I don’t believe in me, who else is gonna believe in me?”

She got her break when, at the age of about 16, she did a day’s filming with fellow Scouse actor Stephen Graham. He took to her and recommended her to his agent, who promptly took her on. “I owe a lot to Stephen,” she says. They spoke on the phone when Killing Eve took off. “I said to him, ‘I can’t believe it’, and he was, like, ‘Stop that. You can believe it, because you’ve worked hard for it. Don’t have this working-class idea of I can’t believe this has happened to me’.” What if, she said, she hadn’t done that day’s filming with him all those years ago? “But you did,” he replied, and as usual it all sounds completely, well, normal.