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Jodie Comer is reflecting on the movie that made her realize she needed to keep taking more serious acting roles.
While Comer, 32, sat down with British GQ for a profile published Monday, June 9 in support of her upcoming movie 28 Years Later, the actress admitted that while she enjoyed making 2021’s Free Guy with Ryan Reynolds, the movie made her realize she needed to stretch her acting wings further to feel satisfied with her work.
“It was my first film and I had the most amazing experience on that job — they were just the most gentle, inclusive, supportive people, and it was incredibly fun,” she said. “But I realized, when I was coming home, Ah, there’s something I’m not feeling. I feel like I’m not stretching. Or not discovering. And I realized that it was the emotional part of it. I wasn’t exercising [that] part of myself.”
Free Guy starred Reynolds, 48, as a bank teller who discovers he is a non-playable character (NPC) in a massive multiplayer online video game. He teams up with Comer’s character Millie, a woman who is trying to prove that the inventors of the video game world stole her idea for the game, after realizing he lives in a video game.
As GQ noted, Comer “mostly gets to wear a wig, shoot guns and look pretty” in Free Guy. For an actress who has won an Emmy Award for Killing Eve and a Tony Award for her work on the stage in plays like Prima Facie, Comer’s experience on the movie helped her decide to keep working on serious subject matter afterward.
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“I realized that’s actually where I get my fulfillment — trying to find those places,” Comer told GQ of finding roles that help her “test her limits,” as the outlet put it.
“If the instincts aren’t there, if I’m not excited by it, then I just don’t want to go near it because then I’m pulling from an artificial place,” she added. “It feels almost dishonest with myself.”
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Alan Markfield/Twentieth Century Fox/THA/Shutterstock
In the years since Free Guy released in theaters, Comer has starred in movies like The Last Duel, Help, The Bikeriders and The End We Start From, among others.
Looking ahead, she will star in a new movie with Hugh Jackman titled The Death of Robin Hood and return to Prima Facie for a tour through the U.K. and Ireland, as GQ reported. In 28 Years Later, she costars with Ralph Fiennes and Aaron Taylor-Johnson in a sequel to 2002’s thriller 28 Days Later.
28 Years Later is in theaters June 20.
