Jodie Comer’s “dishonest” Hollywood debut taught her a career-changing lesson
In 2021, Jodie Comer‘s ascent from British TV star to Hollywood leading lady began in earnest when she starred in one of the few unreserved hits of the pandemic era. From the outside, it looked like she’d navigated the transition to blockbuster movies perfectly, and a career in front of mass audiences was hers for the taking.
However, unfortunately for Comer, even though she enjoyed working on the film and had nothing but positive things to say about everyone she worked with on it, she was left with a feeling of emptiness after the shoot wrapped.
At her first time asking, Comer realised that a big-budget, CGI-heavy, crowd-pleasing endeavour like Free Guy might increase her bank balance, but it was a million miles away from what speaks to her as an actor.
“It was my first film and I had the most amazing experience on that job – they were just the most gentle, inclusive, supportive people, and it was incredibly fun,” Comer told GQ magazine in 2025. “But I realised, when I was coming home, ‘Ah, there’s something I’m not feeling. I feel like I’m not stretching. Or not discovering.'”
After some soul-searching, she realised that playing unemployed software designer Millie Rusk and her sexy video game alter-ego MolotovGirl might have been a blast, but it was an emotionally empty experience. In her previous roles, such as the unhinged Villanelle in Killing Eve, the kidnap victim Ivy Moxam in Thirteen, or Elizabeth of York in The White Princess, she plumbed the emotional depths of her characters, which in turn asked a lot of her as an actor. These roles were challenging, frightening, but ultimately exciting and fulfilling, whereas Free Guy was mostly a lark.
“I wasn’t exercising part of myself,” Comer explained. “I realised that’s actually where I get my fulfilment – trying to find those places. If the instincts aren’t there, if I’m not excited by it, then I just don’t want to go near it.” Fascinatingly, Comer described trying to find depth in a character like Rusk as “pulling from an artificial place” instead of a true, lived-in emotion, and she admitted, “It feels almost dishonest with myself.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Comer’s movie roles post-Free Guy have seen her steer clear of anything that remotely resembles that day-glo Ryan Reynolds exercise in corporate IP management. First, she played the rape victim Marguerite de Carrouges in Ridley Scott’s excellent The Last Duel, a performance that showed how scintillating she could be with weighty, heart-wrenching material to work with. She followed that up with a similarly harrowing role in The End We Start From as a new mother desperately trying to keep her baby alive after an apocalyptic flood lays waste to London.
There would be no reprieve for Comer after these films, either. She next starred in The Bikeriders as the long-suffering wife of an outlaw biker gang member, and played an ailing mother forced to venture outside her walled community into a Britain overrun with rage-afflicted ‘zombies’ in Danny Boyle’s 28 Years Later. Naturally, though, Comer wouldn’t have it any other way. To her, acting is an almost spiritual experience when she can channel these powerful emotions.
“When you get out of your own way, there’s a real presence,” she marvelled. “They’re kind of passing through you. And then to come away from that and go, ‘Wow, what was that? That felt amazing!’ Or, ‘That felt fucking terrible!’, whatever it is.” Indeed, perhaps she counts herself lucky that her first Hollywood role pretty quickly taught her she wouldn’t get that feeling very often on the likes of Free Guy.
