On Killing Eve, Jodie Comer’s Villanelle spends as much time artfully murdering people as she does seducing them. And she doesn’t discriminate: Villanelle will joyfully kill and/or sleep with men and women. Or, in the case of her primary obsession, Eve Polastri (Sandra Oh), Villanelle will joyfully accept a knife to the abdomen: “She did it to show me how much she cares about me,” Villanelle explains of Eve’s stabby behavior early on in season two.
At last night’s cocktail reception hosted by AMC’s Josh Sapan to celebrate Killing Eve’s new season, Vulture asked Comer whether or not she knows she’s become something of a queer icon over the past year. “It’s a strange one,” said Comer. “I’m so detached from the show when I’m not in it. But I definitely sense that — and speaking to Luke Jennings, who wrote the novellas, I know Villanelle has really resonated with the LGBT community.” Comer added that Villanelle’s casual bisexuality has always been one of her favorite things about the character. “The fact that she’s unapologetically herself and free with her sexuality — her sexuality was something I never questioned and always celebrated. That’s what’s so refreshing. It’s just a part of her. That’s what I love about her. It’s not something that [the writers] spoke about or is featured really heavily — you just accept this woman for who she is. And I think it’s really beautiful.”
Speaking of beautiful, we couldn’t walk away from Comer without asking her about the most covetable asset on the series: her flawless skin. In advance of the series’s second season, Comer’s been the center of a slew of profiles, nearly all of which have devoted at least two paragraphs to her complexion. We asked her: Did it creep her out a little bit? And didn’t it feel a little meta to be a fetish object?
“My skin is actually a bit crazy at the minute because of traveling. I have so many zits right now. You step off the plane and you’re like, ‘There he is!’” said Comer, who Vulture can personally confirm was lying. “I have an amazing facialist. But my mom has the most beautiful skin. I’ve been lucky that I got that gene from her. It’s a bit of a crazy one: People are like, ‘What do you use?’ And you feel like a bit of a fraud being like, ‘Well, I use this and this,’ because my mom has such gorgeous skin.” When her skin is behaving though, Comer admitted that she could be rightly accused of feeling herself. “It’s so nice to have a good skin day and go out and be like, ‘Oh, yeah!’” she laughed.
