Trial by Fire

After a barnburning run on Killing. Eve, Jodie Comer heads to Broadway 1 in a piercing courtroom drama. Adam Green bears witness.

- By Adam Green. Photographed by Norman Jean Roy

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