There is something extraordinarily precise about Jodie Comer’s performance in Killing Eve, Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s brutal and unexpected entry into the spree-kill genre that took our top spot as the best TV show of 2018. Comer’s petrifying psychopath, Villanelle, is chillingly playful – like a mastiff that will take your throat out just as soon as it has finished with its ball – with the face of a schoolgirl. In real life, Comer is a wholesome 25-year-old scouser who, when she is not working, still lives at home. Yet she does something to the role to give it an oddly comic texture. Some combination of Comer’s humour – even the muscles in her face have comic timing – and her turn-on-a-sixpence quickness, mental and physical, makes her performance absolutely mesmeric. You are desperate to know what will happen next, even when you know full well that it will just be someone else ending up dead.

Her nonchalant psychopath transformed Pheobe Waller-Bridge’s blood soaked drama into our TV show of the year. The actor on why we’re obsessed with violent women – and why she wants to punch herself in the face

“What I loved about the kills, though,” Comer says, “was that it was always something you’d never, ever think. It was never ‘someone gets stabbed’. Continue reading →