Between 2018 and 2022, Jodie Comer became a star with her virtuoso performance as the gorgeous, gleefully sociopathic assassin Villanelle on the BBC America series Killing Eve, winning a BAFTA and an Emmy and causing everyone to freak out about how great she was. But what she’d always wanted to do was act on the stage. As a 12-year-old in Liverpool, she won first prize at a local drama festival for a monologue about the 1989 Hillsborough Stadium disaster, and at 17 she appeared in a play called The Price of Everything at a theater-in-the-round in Scarborough, North Yorkshire. Still, despite continuing to audition for theatrical roles while she worked in TV and film throughout her teens and 20s, the stage remained elusive. “A lot of the feedback was great,” Comer tells me over tea in New York in her unvarnished Scouse accent. (She is apartment shopping in the city when we meet, a big step after living at home with her parents and younger brother for much of the pandemic.) “But one thing that was resounding was, like, ‘She hasn’t been to drama school and this is too big a task for someone who isn’t classically trained.’ I used to feel quite defeated by that.”
Not one to take “maybe” for an answer, the 29-year-old made her professional stage debut last year with Prima Facie, a stunning one-woman piece by Australian playwright Suzie Miller. In it, Comer gave a critically acclaimed, Evening Standard Award–winning performance as Tessa Ensler (Miller’s nod to The Vagina Monologues author Eve Ensler, now known as V), a razor-sharp young defense lawyer whose facility in the courtroom—especially in cases dealing with sexual assault—becomes effectively meaningless when she must take the stand herself after being raped. Alienated and traumatized, she is quickly disabused of the notion that the legal games she once loved to play had anything to do with seeking justice. “She knows that she’s fiercely intelligent, and she owns that,” Comer says of Tessa, who is all swaggering bravado when the play begins. “She takes joy in her great power. And, of course, that makes the fall—when she’s forced to face everything from the other side—even harder.”
Prima Facie is now headed from the West End to Broadway’s John Golden Theatre, where New York audiences will get to discover in Comer what Justin Martin, the show’s director (The Jungle), saw from the start. “Fundamentally, she’s a stage animal,” he says. “She has an incredible sense of humor and an emotional rawness. She’s very, very honest and absolutely fearless. And all of that bleeds into her performance and the choices that she makes onstage. It’s a natural home for her.”
For Miller’s part, she was so persuaded by what she’d seen in Killing Eve that she didn’t initially realize Comer was English. When her name first came up, “I said, ‘Why would we cast a Russian actor?’ ” the playwright remembers with a laugh. Discovering that Comer shared the working-class background Miller had written for Tessa—who has learned to take advantage of being underestimated—moved her to the top of the list.
As research, Comer and the creative team got to spend time at the Central Criminal Court of England and Wales—more commonly known as the Old Bailey—and observe London barristers at work. (After attending law school at the University of New South Wales, Miller practiced as a human rights and criminal defense lawyer until 2010, when she shifted to playwriting full-time.) “It very much felt like theater,” Comer recalls. “Everyone was playing their role, everyone knew their lines, everyone knew when to come in and when not to come in. It felt presentational in that way, like acting. But the stakes were so incredibly high.” When I suggest that Tessa querying a witness might not be a far throw from Villanelle toying with a victim before swooping in for the kill, Comer says, “Absolutely. She’s like a bird with its prey. She’s having so much fun—playing around with him, making it painful. She’s like, This guy is a fucking idiot, and he has no clue what’s about to come.”
Yet the minds behind Prima Facie also recognize the responsibility they have, staging a 100-minute play about the many ways that a legal system devised by men can fail survivors of sexual violence. “It just felt like we would not be doing our job if we didn’t, as people left the theater, give them some way to deal with what they’ve experienced and hopefully effect some change,” says producer James Bierman. So, the production formed a partnership with Everyone’s Invited, a digital platform where survivors can anonymously share their stories, as well as the Schools Consent Project, a charity devoted to educating teenagers about consent and sexual assault. (Based in the UK, it is due to begin operations Stateside this spring.) “If you want to watch Prima, and you like what Prima stands for, then you have to engage with this, because the two things are absolutely linked,” Bierman adds. “The play doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It exists in a world where Tessa is all too real.”
The response to the play has already been overwhelming; in Australia, where Prima Facie premiered in 2019, and again in England, “we just got so many messages from women,” Miller says. “Handwritten letters dropped off at the stage door, email after email, DMs…I mean, I’ve gotten hundreds a day of women saying, ‘This is what happened to me.’ ” In the long shadow of the #MeToo movement, she finds that now more than ever, “audiences are hungry to have conversations about systems that govern; systems around them that they don’t think are innately fair.” Happily, this isn’t just a show that talks—it’s one that absolutely roars.
In this story: hair, Joey George; makeup, Kiki Gifford.
