Actor Jodie Comer is among the British GQ’s Heroes [IG] cover stars, lensed by Scandebergs [IG] for the June 2025 issue. Gerry O’Kane styles Comer in aware-woman sensuality from Balenciaga, Coperni, Dolce & Gabbana, Dilara Findikoglu, KNWLS, Saint Laurent and more for the fashion story ‘How Jodie Comer focused the fury./ Makeup by Miranda Joyce; hair by Ali Pirzadeh

Comer is interviewed by Hayley Campbell about her new horror sequel film ‘28 Years Later’. The plot of the film is focused on rage, where a virus of that name has obliterated the country.

“I’ve realised my own [rage] just immediately goes to a very emotional place – my anger can so quickly go to tears. I think I swallow it as well,” she says. “I think, as women, we suppress it and that’s probably why I have trouble accessing it – I’ve done that so much that it feels kind of foreign, like I’m not quite sure where to pull it from.”

Rage in Play ‘Prima Facia’

Rage is not confined to her next film. Comer’s ‘Prima Facie’, the one-woman play that won her an Olivier award for the 2022 West End production, and a Tony when it transferred to Broadway in 2023, has also deeply helped her to confront this severe contradiction of inner peace between many men and women.

Comer plays Tessa, a barrister who specialises in defending men accused of sexual assault. As an adept female lawyer Tessa knows how to break a witness in the box, and exactly how much they have to prove to secure a conviction.

Breaking the Witness

“Tessa’s view of the legal system changes when she herself is sexually assaulted and becomes the broken witness in that same box. It’s an intense play” writes Campbell. Comer is on stage alone for the entire one hour and 40 minutes, with no intermission.

The play has been so emotionally draining for Comer as an actor, that she prepared for her West End run by sitting and waiting, drowning out the raw negativity about to consume for 100 minutes with music. Absorbed in the sounds and messages of artists Sophie Ellis-Bextor, Alison Goldfrapp and Florence Welch, Comer would steady herself until someone tapped her on the shoulder to tell her it was time to go on. That’s quite a story.

More than most plays, Campbell describes ‘Primacie Facie’ as an experience that demands something of its audience. It is a play that forces them to reckon with their own lives; what they’ve done, what they’ve experienced, what they’ve believed.

The play demands that the audience recalibrate their feelings of shame, and blame around sexual assault. People cry in the dark, writes GQ. You can imagine the deluge of mail Comer has received from people seeing the play — an unstoppable gushing of mail in both London and New York that waited for her daily examination of one of the most painful episodes in women’s lives.

In 2023, Jodie Comer did receive an Tony Award in New York for her lead role in Suzie Miller’s ‘Prima Facie’ drama. It was her first-ever performance on a professional stage. ~ Anne