How Jodie Comer found her biker voice

Sweet asses. If you are looking for a phrase to help you get into a The Chicago Midwest accent and “candy asses” are the tools that do it – at least according to Jodie Comer.

The Tony Award-winning actress is a chameleon in every sense of the word. In “Killing Eve,” where she played a hitwoman with a closet full of disguises, in “Free Guy,” where she played both Millie Rusk and Millie’s online persona Molotov Girl, and as the centerpiece of Ridley Scott’s triptych “The Last Duel,” Comer has proven capable of impressive transformations. But “The Bikeriders” might be her most extreme yet.

Written and directed by Jeff Nichols and based on Danny Lyon’s photo book of the same name, the film tells the story of the Vandals, a Chicago motorcycle club, over a period of about a decade, beginning in the 1960s. The club itself is run by Johnny (Tom Hardy) and Benny (Austin Butler), but the story is told from the point of view of Benny’s wife Kathy, played by Comer.

Kathy is a regular woman from Chicago who has never set foot in a biker bar. In fact, in “The Bikeriders,” she immediately tries to leave the bar until she meets Benny. The connection is instant and as she cheekily declares in her first interview scene, “Five weeks later, I married him.”

Finding Kathy’s voice

Although The Bikeriders is based primarily on a photo book, Comer had the bonus of using the real voice of the woman she played. The film lasted 30 minutes and it was immediately clear that Kathy did not have a typical North Chicago accent (although it very Midwest) for unknown reasons.

Comer was faced with a choice: either she wanted to use the accent that people would expect, since the Vandals were from Chicago, or she wanted to stay true to Kathy herself. The actress was determined to do the latter and always had the audio file to hand.

“That was basically my Spotify playlist, you know?” Comer told TheWrap. “I lived with that whenever I could. We kind of broke the scenes apart, and when I was working on the script and analyzing it, I had separate audios for each scene. But there was just so much to dig into.”

For those unfamiliar with the Chicago or Midwestern accent, the tricky part is the A’s and the Os. Those vowels are especially rounded. Also, the real Kathy had a very nasal voice, which Comer wanted to perfect. At this point, it’s not an accent she could easily go back to.

But there was more to Kathy’s voice than just what came out of her mouth. Comer immediately fell in love with the fact that Kathy was “a great storyteller,” and knew it would be a challenge for her to tap into that aspect of the character, since Comer herself had never played a narrator role before.

“I have a terrible talent for telling stories,” Comer said. “Like, if I told you something that happened yesterday, I’d tell you the end before the middle and forget one important thing. And you know, I see people get kind of glazed over in their eyes when they tell things, but she just had that talent.”

The refinement of this part of the character took place less in front of the camera and more in the scenes in which Kathy was heard as a voiceover.

“I remember having conversations with Jeff (Nichols) where we were wondering how we could measure that performance. If it’s not on screen, do you really need more from me, vocally, to portray something?” she explained. “Because sometimes it’s just different. And so we tried to somehow manage that and decide what was needed.”

She added: “You know, when I listened to the audio recording, she was talking so fast that she was always on to the next thought. She was lighting a cigarette and yelling at the kids. Her mind was going a million miles an hour. And I wanted to try to capture that while also conveying the dialect, not Think about the dialect, the acting!”

Collaboration with Austin Butler

In fact, Kathy speaks quickly and a lotand one person in particular. Because as much as she is the keeper of history in The Bikeriders, she is also a key figure as Austin Butler’s wife on screen. She has her own interests in the story and all she wants is for her husband to be safe with her.

She tells him this after Kathy is in real danger due to a certain incident in the story. But Benny is a man of few words, so Butler mostly just has to watch her while Comer expresses her worries.

Things came to a head at a particularly pivotal moment in the film – one that Comer thought about a lot. But the actress didn’t mind having a partner who couldn’t give her much back at that moment.

“I think that just added to the dynamic, you know, because I always felt – I wanted so much more for Kathy. I think she wanted to be loved, she wanted to experience love, and I imagined her clinging to every morsel that he gave her, you know? And she wanted more.”

Unraveling those layers proved to be a joy for Comer in the film. Up until this point, she has chosen her roles largely based on the emotions they evoke in her when she reads them. And in the case of Kathy, the character was “delicious” from the start.

“I was like, ‘Who is that?'” Comer recalls. “She could read the phone book and I was entranced and couldn’t stop. I think that was it. She just seemed very unique and authentic and funny. She really made me laugh, but she wasn’t trying to be funny!”

“She was completely unaware of herself,” Comer continued. “And I just liked that. She was very true to herself and I thought, oh, this is going to be so cool to embrace that.”

One of Comer’s biggest goals on The Bikeriders was to make Kathy feel like “someone people know,” and the actress is currently pursuing that “mission” in several projects.

Having played roles with more obvious dualities in Killing Eve and Free Guy – both of which involved different physical manifestations of her character – it’s proving to be a fun time exploring the nuances of a character in more subtle ways.

“It’s great to play around with a character like Villanelle who is a little bit off. I felt like with Villanelle it’s a little bit of a tightrope walk. And you have the kind of duality of Molotov Girl, which is always fun,” Comer said. “(But) this movie is very grounded and natural, and that kind of striving to make a character feel like someone that people know, who is familiar and kind of relatable, I love that kind of work too.”

“And I did a movie after the plague called ‘The End We Start From’ which was very stripped down and raw,” she added. “And I think they can be kind of exposing, but in a good way. I guess right now I’m kind of enjoying that. But you know, to play another character like Villanelle would be great.”

“The Bikeriders” hits theaters on Friday, June 21st.