Jodie Comer on Killing Eve: ‘When I first heard ‘assassin’, I thought: oh my God, I’m not Charlize Theron’

A poised, alluring young woman sits in a Viennese ice cream parlour, essaying smiles at a little girl sitting nearby who is studiously ignoring her. Clocking the waiter, who grins widely at the girl and receives the same in return, the woman tries the same and finally gets a cheerful smile. Delighted, she strides out of the shop, pausing only to tip the girl’s ice cream into her lap. Meet Villanelle, the dark, irresistible heart of eight-part BBC drama Killing Eve.

Jodie Comer, the 25-year-old Liverpudlian who plays her, is neither sociopathic nor vindictive. She is, however, late. Comer has arrived at a BAFTA screening for Killing Eve halfway through the post-screening panel in patterned blue Stine Goye dress and Chloé trainers, straight from the set of the second series (commissioned before the first had even aired). It’s a good excuse, but this wouldn’t have happened to Villanelle, I suggest when we meet afterwards. Comer laughs. “No, she’s a proper control freak.”

And, it’s worth mentioning, a first-rate assassin. The premise of Fleabag creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s outrageously entertaining thriller pits Comer’s inventive, narcissistic, ruthless, epicurean, free-living and -loving hitwoman par excellence, against Sandra Oh’s Eve Polastri, an MI5 officer bored by her deskbound job and comfortable in her marriage to a dependable teacher. A hunch sets Eve on Villanelle’s tail, and an obsessive game of cat and mouse begins.

“There’s mutual fascination and admiration,” reckons Comer, most recently seen as the Other Woman in Doctor Foster and Elizabeth of York in The White Princess.

“Villanelle’s ego goes through the roof when she finds there’s a lady from MI5 searching for her. There’s something in Eve that’s missing in Villanelle, and vice versa.”

Comer’s first instincts were not to take the part. “When I first got an email from my agent saying ‘assassin’, I thought: oh my God, I’m not Charlize Theron. I couldn’t imagine myself in that role, then I read it and everything I thought it was going to be, it wasn’t. I was obsessed with Fleabag so I knew the script was going to be special, but Phoebe dares say things other people don’t.

“To me, assassins always feel unreachable, but you find yourself relating to Villanelle. That ice-cream scene is shocking, but don’t tell me we don’t all have those moments in our minds where we think we’d like to do that… I was fascinated by her, and she made me laugh.”

‘I can be very self-conscious and I learnt to drop that. The longer we went on, the more free I felt. Villanelle’s taught me to have fun’

Comer made sense of Villanelle by imagining her as an actress, going home and preparing for her next job, trying lines, costumes, accents (the assassin is Russian, the actress pure Scouse). Villanelle has even taught her a little about her trade. “I can be very self-conscious and I learnt to drop that: if there was something silly I did in a scene, I’d be caring too much about what other people thought. The longer we went on, the more free I felt. Villanelle’s taught me to have fun.”

Handily, the role that has made her less self-conscious is also likely to make her stop-in-the-street famous – she is luminous and terrifyingly convincing in the part. As such, Comer, a winning combination of eager confidence and straight-faced modesty, was reluctant to take full advantage of the end-of-episode costume sales. “I did pick a few pieces but, by the end of the shoot, so much of it was too close to her. Villanelle expresses herself through her clothes, it’s her only outlet.

“I thought with the Berlin suit [a patterned Dries van Noten affair], I can’t wear that, what if I walk down the street in it and people think, has she not got her own clothes? I’ve see people making Halloween costumes of her on Twitter – it’s mad.”

Villanelle’s extraordinary aesthetic has been a Instagram sensation: winsome in a pale blue Burberry lace dress for a kill in Tuscany, girlish in a pink Molly Goddard organza dress and biker boots for a Parisian therapy appointment; potentially lethal in anything. The same could also have been said of Comer on set, for better or worse. “I’m a wuss and very uncoordinated, so I’d take 10 takes to handle a knife correctly or walk around on set with the gun pointing the wrong way.”

She still lives in Liverpool with her parents and younger brother Charlie, and talks of them often, in part crediting her facility with accents to years in front of the TV with her dad, imitating daft voices on adverts. Might the Stateside success of Killing Eve prompt a move to LA? “Noooo!” She pauses. “Well, never say never, but not yet.”

‘When I was about 16 I left my agent, and dad said, ‘okay, you know where the phone is’’

“I’d find it hard to leave my family,” she continues. “They’ve always supported me and made sure I was the one taking the lead. When I was about 16 I left my agent, and dad said, ‘okay, you know where the phone is.’ I was like, ‘Whaaat? Isn’t this a dad job?’ They’ve let me take the reins, but they’re always there to listen.”

Her breakthrough came young: musical theatre’s loss was television drama’s gain. “When I was about 12, four of us were doing a dance from Chicago at a talent show. I went on holiday and they said I couldn’t be in it because I hadn’t been there to practise. I was devastated, but there were about 30 people my age performing a monologue at the Liverpool Drama Festival and my mum suggested I ask my drama teacher if I could do a monologue there.”

It went well and, prompted by her drama teacher, she got the lead part in a BBC Radio play – her first audition. Guest spots in the usual serials followed – Doctors, Casualty, Silent Witness – until her 2013 breakthrough in E4’s effervescent, affecting teen drama My Mad Fat Diary.

“It was a huge moment,” she nods. “My first big series with a group of young actors my age, and I got to grow into this character for six episodes (eventually 16, over three series). It was so exciting and to have so many people say it helped them was amazing.”

‘For everyone else I know finding a script by a woman is like a unicorn. But I feel so lucky that it’s been my experience’

Gradually, both shows and parts got bigger. There was Rillington Place opposite Tim Roth; Doctor Foster and The White Princess; Snatches, a short BBC4 monologue written by Waller-Bridge’s long-time collaborator Vicky Jones; the lead in BBC3’s hit thriller Thirteen; and now Killing Eve, with the last four all written by women. Coincidence?

“For everyone else I know it’s like a unicorn,” she laughs. “but I feel so lucky that it’s been my experience. Whether that’s something I’ve consciously connected to, I don’t know. It’s just happened that way.”

Comer doesn’t like to read too much into things. Although she concedes that having two female protagonists is “interesting”, for her there’s no great message to Killing Eve, but its simultaneous embrace and upending of “the strong female character” is striking. The women are defined by their work rather than their domestic circumstances; assassins, meanwhile, have tended to be either angsty and traumatised or chilly and robotic, and usually men.

Villanelle is so effective in part because she is a woman and thus underestimated. “That’s the perception of Eve as well,” she says. “They’re both intelligent, skilled women who are being overlooked.”

No danger of anyone making that mistake with Comer now. After series two comes a film (“I can’t talk about it”) and then “something opposite to Villanelle”. She fixes me with a chilling look, before chuckling. “But there’s no one like Villanelle.”

‘Killing Eve’ begins on BBC One on Saturday 15 September at 9.15pm. The series will be available as a box set on BBC Three from 10pm