‘I was actually quite consumed by fear’: Jodie Comer on the challenge of her Broadway stage role

Until last year Jodie Comer had never performed onstage. The 30-year-old Killing Eve star, who began her career as a teenager, hadn’t gone to drama school. She hadn’t studied voice or movement. Her comfort was in the close-up, the medium shot. She knew how to make her face still and her voice quiet, and to let the camera do the rest. The theatre directors she auditioned for didn’t trust that she could fill a stage.

“It kind of felt unattainable,” she says.

But she is filling one now. On Broadway, at the John Golden Theatre, her face is emblazoned above the marquee, twice. The art for Prima Facie, an intimate and harrowing monodrama about a woman contending with the fallout of a sexual assault, shows Comer bathed in pink tones, serene, in a barrister’s wig, her eyes closed; it also shows her washed in blue, screaming. The play, which opens in New York this weekend after a London run that has just won Comer this year’s Laurence Olivier Award for best actress, is an hour and 20 minutes long. She is alone onstage for all of them. It’s the theatrical equivalent of being shoved down a mountain the first time you put on skis, or off a high dive before you have even learned to swim.

Comer puts it a little differently. “I pushed myself,” she says.

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This is on a Sunday morning in late March, at an out-of-the way table at a West Village cafe. Comer, buoyed by the London-to-New York time change, has arrived early, chipper and casual in jeans and a fisherman’s sweater. (Casual, but not entirely anonymous: the reservation was in my name, yet a waiter had already brought a plate of complimentary pastries.) A plastic clip held her hair away from her face.

About that face: Comer has wide-set eyes, full lips and an impossible milk-and-roses complexion. She looks like a Botticelli goddess who has stepped out of the canvas and into some cute ankle boots. And yet, if you have seen her previous work — the action comedy Free Guy, the action drama The Last Duel, the crusading BBC film Help and, most significantly, Killing Eve, the queer assassin fever dream — you will know that her beauty is usually the least interesting thing about her. That prettiness is a mask she can remove at will, exposing something weirder, spikier, wilder beneath.

“It’s like Jodie didn’t get the memo that she is staggeringly beautiful,” Shawn Levy, who directed Free Guy, says. “Jodie is uninterested in relying on her physical appearance.”

Unlike many beautiful actors, Comer has mostly avoided wife, girlfriend and love-interest parts — and their inherent limitations. “From early on, my characters were quite nuanced or multifaceted,” she says. “I was probably very lucky that that’s where I started. Once people see you in that light, they latch on to that.”

At the cafe, the morning sun shows her as friendly, unassuming almost, until she begins to speak about her work. Then, behind those wide eyes, something like lightning flashes.

“Jodie is extraordinarily powerful,” Shannon Murphy, a director who worked closely with her on Killing Eve, tells me. “People aren’t just going to cast her as the girl next door. Because it’s a waste.”

And yet the role that the Liverpudlian plays in Prima Facie is very much a girl next door, which lends the show much of its heartbreak and force. Written by Suzie Miller, an Australian attorney turned playwright, and directed by Justin Martin (The Jungle), also Australian, Prima Facie centres on Tessa Ensler, a promising barrister who has transcended her working-class origins and accent. When she finds herself the victim of a sexual assault, a crime whose accused perpetrators she had often defended, Tessa’s poise and selfhood collapse. In this play, the reality and violence of the assault are never in doubt. That it should happen to a woman like Comer’s Tessa — so pretty, so assertive, so canny — means that it could happen to anyone.

Prima Facie debuted in Sydney in 2019, starring the Australian actor Sheridan Harbridge. When Miller and Martin knew that they wanted to take it to London, they began throwing around the names of English actors. Martin suggested Comer. Miller said no. She had seen Comer in Killing Eve, as the mercurial assassin Villanelle, who is Russian-born and Russian-accented. Comer’s Bafta- and Emmy-winning command of the role was so absolute that Miller assumed that Comer was actually Russian. Once Martin gently corrected her, a script was sent.

It reached Comer early in Britain’s lockdown, in Liverpool, where she was living with her parents. It spoke to her directly, and at volume. She had several friends who had undergone versions of Tessa’s experience. And the professional challenge was as serious as it was undeniable.

“I was so fearful of it. I knew if I said no to it, it would be purely because of that,” Comer says. “But there was a part of myself deep down that believed I could do it, and I was interested in how I was going to get to that point.”

That fear powered her initial approach to the role. “She gets scared,” Martin says. “But her way of dealing with it is to throw herself into it.”

Comer has always been an intuitive actor. The challenge, she found, was to take that intuition and extend it outward so that it reached the last row of the balcony. “Like, how do I emote from the top of my head to the tip of my toes?” she says.

Rehearsals, which began early in 2022, were rigorous, as was Comer’s research. She spoke to barristers, to police officers, to a high-court judge. She visited a police station and attended a hearing. She had herself fitted for a wig. What would a woman like Tessa wear, she wanted to know. What would she eat? How would she sit, stand and speak? In watching some of the women barristers at work, Comer felt an immediate connection.

“There were elements of it that felt like theatre: the costumes, the cues, the rehearsal of the lines,” she says.

Television and film sets provide elaborate, realistic environments, especially if the projects are shot on location. Theatre is a more symbolic space, a conjuration of lights and plywood, which offered Comer a kind of freedom. In that glow, she could experiment, she could play. “What theatre really sparked in me was that curiosity and sense of imagination,” she says with all the eagerness of a recent convert. Onstage there was no armor, no safety, no ability to stop and take it again, particularly in the scene in which Comer, alone on the floor of the stage, depicts the assault.

Miller was convinced, even during rehearsals. “She is magnificent onstage; she’s a theatre animal,” she says of Comer. “She’s the character. She’s there.”

But after years of performing on television and film, Comer hadn’t known how a live audience would respond. Her anxiety remained until the first curtain and perhaps even after. “I was actually quite consumed by fear,” she says. “I didn’t really come up for air.”

She recalls that, toward the end of the first preview in London, she heard a woman in the orchestra crying. “It was the most guttural cry,” Comer says. “It spread around the theatre. It was like the audience were giving each other this unspoken permission to feel whatever was coming up for them.”

The actor Stephen Graham, who worked with a teenage Comer on Good Cop and then again on Help, saw Prima Facie in London and wept through it, admiring “the beauty and the subtlety and the nuance and the craftsmanship that went into that performance”, he says.

I didn’t see it in London, but I watched it a few weeks ago, on video, via a National Theatre Live performance capture. Her craftsmanship was apparent from the first few minutes. Look at Comer in a robe, I thought to myself. Look how good she is. Then the character seemed to take her over. Absorbed in the story, I forgot about Comer, forgot about her beauty, and thought only of Tessa.

Miller had noticed this, too. “You don’t look at her and go, ‘There’s a beautiful woman crying.’ You go, ‘There’s a devastated woman crying,’” she says.

Over breakfast, Comer had said that despite her leading-lady facade, she understands herself as a character actor, someone who wants to disappear into a part, even though or especially because she can’t even disappear into a New York cafe. “I’d love to get to a point where I play a role where I don’t recognise myself,” she says.

Prima Facie began as a personal challenge, a dare almost. Could she manage alone onstage for all that time? Could she pull off the scene changes and the radical shifts in emotion? But it has become about something more.

Women waited for her at the stage door every night in London, telling her that their experiences mirrored Tessa’s or that they were considering careers in law to support women like her. By vanishing into Tessa, she has given these women a way to recognise themselves. That image near the marquee? It’s her face, doubly exposed, but it’s also a mosaic composed of photographs of women who submitted their pictures and stories. That’s what Comer wants: to feel part of something bigger than herself, to feel some greater purpose is working through her.

“It’s those moments where you step out of your way when you feel the most fulfilled,” she says. — This article originally appeared in The New York Times

Prima Facie opens at the John Golden Theatre in New York on Sunday, April 23rd, and runs until Sunday, June 11th