There’s a scene at the beginning of where Jodie Comer’s character, Kathy, walks into a noisy Chicago bar to meet her friend. It’s late at night and the room is bristling with members of the fictional outlaw bikie gang, the Vandals. “I never felt so out of place in all my life,” she says.
That scene was not a million miles from what actually happened to Comer in real life. As she stepped onto set, which was filled with a lot of men doing the big accents, big motorbikes, big feelings – Comer felt herself starting to shrink. “If you’re a woman and you’re in quite a male-dominated space, I think there’s sometimes a habit or conditioning that we have to, like, make ourselves smaller,” says Comer.
“And I could feel myself doing that a little bit, sometimes feeling shy, and once I became aware of it I kind of snapped myself out of it.” To hear the 31-year-old tell it – late one Friday night over Zoom in her delightful Liverpudlian accent – is startling, as she is such a dynamic performer it’s difficult to believe she’d ever shrink in front of anyone. As the Russian assassin Villanelle she stomped all over , and she was the best thing by far in Ben Affleck and Matt Damon’s muddied historical epic .
Her powerful stint in the West End and on Broadway in the one-woman sexual-assault drama landed her best actress Olivier and Tony awards – not bad for her first major stage role. “I’d heard actresses speak of it before, like, ‘I was the only woma.
