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odie Comer recalls being starstruck three times, and this trio, it’s fair to say, are a rum bunch: Helen Mirren, former TV news anchor Sir Trevor McDonald and the bloke who played the character Sinbad in the Liverpool-based UK soap opera Brookside. 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 Scouser to the core; and she didn’t even dare go up to the news legend when she spotted him at the Baftas. “Do you know what I mean?” she says in her broad Liverpool accent. “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 (sorry, Sinbad), 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 an episode. “I guess what’s interesting about Killing Eve is that you’re constantly switching between these two women,” she muses when we meet at a London
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members’ club, shortly before series two airs. “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, she is relatively 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. The worrying thing is that Villanelle is a logical role for Comer. She’s already been a bit of a cow in My Mad Fat Diary; even more of a cow in BBC’s Doctor Foster, as the young marriagebuster; and a scheming queen in The White Princess. She has also played an exorcism, been kidnapped and much more. “My friends from school used to say, ‘Why don’t you ever play normal?’” she says with a smile. But it’s clear she’d like nothing less. In person, Comer is pretty tall and extremely pretty, with that striking heart-shaped face and those big, expressive eyes. 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’), but of course it looks great. 85 percent 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 following week, she’s off to film a comedy in Hollywood with Ryan Reynolds, and she’ll do the third series of Eve, already announced, 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 America, 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.” 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. “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 two of them 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?’ It’s sometimes nice, though, to meet people in a more natural environment. But I don’t think either of us can remember very much.” Waller-Bridge is not writing the new series because of