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is a CBC Podcast. Hey,

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I'm Talia Schlanger sitting in for Tom Power. You're

0:33

listening to Q. By the time

0:35

she finished high school, like when most

0:37

of her friends were picking out prom

0:39

outfits, Jodi Comer was already racking up

0:41

credits as a young actor in Liverpool.

0:44

She's one of those performers who has a pretty

0:47

limited experience in drama school. She didn't

0:49

grow up in an acting family or

0:51

move away from home to hit it

0:53

big. But directors and

0:55

casting agents found her. And

0:58

it was kind of inevitable. They found

1:00

that she had a gift. At

1:02

26, Jodi Comer became the youngest

1:04

ever actor to win an Emmy for Best

1:06

Lead Actress in a Drama. That was for

1:09

the show Killing Eve. A couple of years

1:11

later, she got her first professional stage role

1:13

on Broadway. In the show

1:15

Prima Facey, her first professional stage

1:18

role was a one-woman show that

1:20

she won a Tony Award for.

1:22

Now Jodi Comer is in a role

1:25

inspired by a real person. In her

1:27

new film, The Bike Riders, she plays

1:29

a woman who married into a biker

1:31

gang. I don't want you riding. Yeah,

1:33

it scares me, especially soon after surgery. I

1:35

don't like it. You don't like it. Oh,

1:37

I get worried. I should just

1:39

go. What? No, it's better.

1:41

You'd be better off. Stop it. Not

1:44

having to take care of me. Worry

1:47

about me. No. That's a clip from

1:49

The Bike Riders, which also stars Austin Butler,

1:51

Tom Hardy, and Michael Shannon. May

1:53

I note that Jodi is from Liverpool and

1:55

you just heard her do an incredible Midwestern

1:57

accent. She'll talk about that. The film is

2:00

inspired by an actual Midwestern motorcycle club

2:02

that started in the 60s. So

2:05

Jodi had access to photos and

2:07

recordings of Kathy, the actual biker

2:09

wife who inspired her character in

2:11

the movie. Here's Tom Powers'

2:13

conversation with Jodi Comer. How

2:16

are you? Hi, I'm good, I'm good, how

2:18

are you? I'm not too bad, congratulations on this thing.

2:21

Thank you. I heard, now you'll

2:23

have to tell me the story, I heard that you

2:25

singed yourself making this or something like that. Oh

2:27

yeah, yeah. What happened? Kathy smokes

2:30

like cigarettes for breakfast. Every image

2:32

I saw of her, she was

2:34

smoking. So it was something

2:37

I took up at home as I was like

2:39

learning my dialogue. And I just wanted to make

2:41

sure that I looked like I did this every

2:43

day and went to like

2:45

my cigarette on a gas hob

2:47

and the flame singed my eyelashes.

2:50

It was way too high, so I never

2:52

did that again, nor will I ever. Hold

2:54

on, you were smoking real smokes or were

2:56

you smoking movie cigarettes? No, they were real

2:58

smokes. Not on set, they were real at

3:00

home, but on set is like they give

3:02

you like hairable cigarettes. That's

3:04

dedication, Jodi. Well, you know, I have

3:07

little pet peeves of like, if people look like

3:09

they don't smoke, you know, when they

3:11

need to, or like if actors, I

3:13

can see them not eating the food on their

3:16

plates in a scene, you know, they're trying to

3:18

avoid eating the food, like it really grates on

3:20

me. So I always want to try. I

3:22

got that one with guitar players and with guitar

3:24

players in movies whose hands are in the right position.

3:27

And I have that with cups, when people drink

3:29

from cups and there's obviously nothing in the cup. That's

3:31

true, yes, that's a good one. That's

3:33

a really good one, actually. So I stayed home when I

3:35

drank 14 cups to get right.

3:37

No, it's okay. Yeah, it's okay. Listen,

3:40

I wanted to ask you about this. So for people

3:42

who don't know, the film is inspired by a real

3:44

motorcycle club turned gang from Chicago. Your character, Kathy, who

3:47

you just mentioned, modeled after a real woman named Kathy,

3:49

who's married to one of the members. She's one of

3:51

the only women in the film. She's very

3:53

important in the film because she's the narrator of the

3:55

film. And so this is Chicago,

3:58

this is the Midwest, and you're not from

4:00

there. And yet I'm here reading that this

4:02

character reminded you of your nan What

4:05

does that mean? How come? There were

4:07

qualities about her which I recognized in

4:10

my nan. One being that my nan

4:12

was an incredible storyteller You

4:14

know, she could recount something that happened and it

4:16

might be the fifth time that she's told you

4:18

it But it would always somehow get even more

4:22

Interesting and exciting and I think

4:24

she's incredibly vivacious. There's a humor within

4:27

her. There's an honesty So

4:29

yeah, these were these were things that I

4:31

felt familiar to me with with women in

4:33

my life Especially coming from Liverpool, you know,

4:35

how do you mean? There's

4:37

a quality that I think of with

4:39

I guess generally northern people but

4:42

especially like thinking of like in regards to

4:44

a woman just northern women in the way

4:46

in which they carry themselves and Their

4:49

humor and their warmth felt very much what

4:51

who Kathy was you had access to a

4:53

lot about the real Kathy you had Access

4:56

to photographs you had access to I believe audio

4:59

recordings audio tapes of her speaking. She's okay I

5:01

think she's you don't want to go out with

5:03

him. She's nobody wants to go out with him

5:05

and I says why she's because He cracks up

5:07

on his bike every time he gets on his

5:10

bike. He has an accident, you know I

5:12

wonder if you could tell me the most Like

5:14

either the most surprising or the most interesting thing that

5:17

you found when you were going through those tapes when

5:19

you're going through Those archives it was fascinating to have

5:21

in the audio because you were able to really hear

5:24

Depending upon her kind of stresses or

5:28

Inflections or delivery if she was kind

5:30

of maybe lying or not You

5:33

know You

5:35

could kind of tell in the way she said something Yeah,

5:38

yeah, there was there was certain. I

5:40

mean listen, this is just my Kind

5:44

of delving into that but then Yeah,

5:46

or you know, it might be saying that she doesn't

5:48

really care about one thing But you can you

5:51

can hear and her voice that that's that's

5:53

not the case so that was amazing to

5:56

kind of pick apart those things and use as

5:58

much as I as I wanted,

6:00

but it was great because you could just hear the

6:03

chaos around her as well, the light in

6:05

the cigarettes, pull the cigarettes out the pack,

6:07

shouting at the kids, telling the kids to

6:09

get inside, or her friends

6:11

constantly coming through the door, and oh,

6:13

like her friend making a comment. This

6:15

is a family picnic. His kids were

6:18

there too, you know? Yeah, but he

6:20

doesn't get stoned out of his mind

6:22

either. No, but then thinking last year,

6:25

I didn't know any of the people there neither.

6:27

Yeah, I spent a lot of time with them, so

6:30

I was very, very fond of her. How

6:32

was the accent? I know you had a

6:35

dialect coach, and I read a little bit about

6:37

how you studied to

6:40

get the Chicago sort of Midwestern

6:42

accent, which is a strange one you don't actually

6:44

hear in movies very often. Can you tell

6:46

me a little bit about what your mouth has to

6:48

do? What a little bit about what your,

6:51

do you know what I mean? About how to like- Oh my God,

6:53

I don't know if I could give you the technicals. It

6:58

was so tricky to get into. Was

7:00

it? Yeah, because like, I

7:03

mean, she had such a, like

7:05

it was very, she was quite nasally. She

7:08

made very interesting stresses on

7:10

certain syllables and words, and

7:13

I think the biggest thing was that she was from

7:15

Chicago, but when I started working with my dialect coach,

7:18

Victoria Hanlon, she was like, she

7:21

might be from Chicago, but every vowel

7:23

sound is a complete contradiction. This

7:26

is not a general Chicago accent. So she

7:29

was like, do you want to do a general Chicago or do

7:31

you want to try and emulate this audio?

7:33

And I was like, well, I want to emulate the

7:35

audio because that to me was gold,

7:38

you know? And it's what drew me into her.

7:40

It's what really kind of connected me to her.

7:42

And it just felt like a shame not to

7:44

explore that. So I'm sure there'll be a lot

7:46

of people who watch this movie who don't hear

7:48

the audio and they think that's not a Chicago

7:51

accent, you know? But that

7:53

wasn't necessarily what I was aiming for. Yeah.

7:58

But you're pretty good with that.