Zombies, rage, horror: Jodie Comer says her new film feels very familiar

The Age

a day ago

We all lived through what looked like a sci-fi scenario during the initial Covid lockdown, says Jodie Comer. Streets deserted, shops closed, birds singing to the empty air: it wasn't a zombie apocalypse, obviously, but London looked very much as it did in Danny Boyle's 2002 film 28 Days Later.
'When you think back to that movie, there was that famous shot of Cillian Murphy walking through a derelict London and back then, that was so hard to imagine,' she says. 'You thought: how did they manage to do that? And then, lo and behold, we had a pandemic and that was exactly what it was like.'
The rabid, flesh-chewing humans in 28 Days Later were infected by what was called 'the rage virus', which transformed an ordinary person within seconds into a roaring, murderous fiend: rather different initial symptoms from a dry cough and loss of taste. The source of the disease in the film, however, was weirdly prescient: it was carried by monkeys in a Cambridge laboratory, and released by animal rights activists who became the disease's first carriers. And, as would later be the case in real life, once it was out there, nobody knew what to do.
Comer, 32, is here to talk about her role in 28 Years Later, set in a version of Britain that has struggled alone with this virus – which has killed almost everybody – since it was first released. Quarantined from the rest of the world, the country is now no more than a scattering of survivors, including some clusters of infected who have found ways to live with their permanent rage.
Once again, Boyle is working from a script by novelist and fellow filmmaker Alex Garland. It isn't a sequel, according to Boyle.
'It has precedents, obviously, in the original contagion, the original outbreak, but it's also a singular film in itself.' The characters have changed and, after 28 years, so have their circumstances.
Comer is still best known as the wild, shape-shifting assassin Villanelle in Killing Eve, although the dazzling CV she has amassed since then ranges from the hit play about a lawyer dealing with her own rape, Prima Facie (which went online during Covid, to huge success), to the gritty 2023 American drama The Bikeriders.
Also, by one of those strange, actorly coincidences, Comer also starred in the first British drama to tackle the social convulsion of Covid: Jack Thorne's Help (2021) culminated in Comer's care worker delivering a furious monologue to camera about the indifference of the community to the virus' many elderly victims. That was the cinema verite version of the virus; 28 Years Later is the full-blown horror retelling.
It was, however, the prospect of working with Boyle – director of Trainspotting, Slumdog Millionaire and The Beach, as well as the landmark 28 Days Later – that drew her to the new film. 'It was a lot of the original crew from the first movie and they're all incredibly innovative,' she says. 'I was excited to be part of it.' Comer plays Isla, a woman living with her husband Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) in a community of 150 people on Holy Island, off England's north-east coast.
Without power or technology, they have reverted to a way of life Boyle says looks back to the 1950s as a moral safe haven, but which is in other ways medieval. The islanders protect themselves with bows and arrows; the island is connected to the mainland by a causeway, which is exposed or covered according to the tides. The story follows her son Spike (Alfie Williams) who is considered old enough at 12 to join a hunting party going to pick off infected on the mainland.
'Everyone had a point of reference to relate to a virus spreading,' says Comer. 'How that makes people behave, how it makes people depend on each other because of that need to survive.' And while Covid was, obviously, very different to the film's scenario, it showed that survival could be precarious. Everyone knows Isla is unwell.
'And she's been kind of ostracised, expected to stay in bed all day,' says Comer. 'Nobody knows how to deal with her. And we know what it's like just being confined within four walls – I think we got very familiar with everyone's bedrooms over Zoom during the pandemic.'
Another recent phenomenon that fed into the thinking behind the film, says Boyle, was Brexit. 'Because that was about isolation,' he says. 'We turned our back on Europe and began to look backwards. It's portrayed as being a new future for us, but really it's nostalgic. The community in 28 Years Later, once they're shut off, lacks any of the technology that accompanied so much of our advancement. So they turn back to a vision of post-war Britain, accompanied by bows and arrows. Everything plays into it. It feels quite accurate about Britain, in certain respects – about England, anyway.'
Loading
Not that it is actually political, he corrects himself. Journalists have not been allowed to see the film and Boyle is clearly under instructions to keep the story under wraps, but he can say that it is about survival. 'In the obvious sense: how do the survivors go about surviving, which is about the Holy Island community and how their lives are organised – including the blooding of this young lad, taken to the mainland to get his first kill, because he has to learn how to defend the island.'
Spike is the story's beating heart, not only because he is the adventurer but because he represents a generation that has no memory of life before the virus. 'If technology stops, if it's interrupted, that stops everything,' says Boyle. 'These are children – analogue natives – who have only heard rumours about life before culture stopped for them. Obviously the rest of the world carried on and that's depicted rather wonderfully in the film, but stories about their previous times become very distorted.
'We talked about it in terms of individual characters and how they would relate to their memories, how they would pass them on. And how much you can even hope. Do you maintain hope that things will return to the way they were, or do you accept the way things are now and make the best of it?'
The virus survives too. Indeed, it thrives. 'What other world governments – the United Nations, the European Union – had hoped was that by isolating the UK, they would let the virus die out. Of course, the reality – and we know this from Covid – is that they don't die out. They mutate, becoming more or less powerful, more or less dangerous.'
In 28 Days Later, the infected literally raged themselves to early deaths, starving as they screamed. After 28 years, there are still some emaciated infected collapsing mid-bellow to die. 'But not all of them have, so clearly, they've learned to feed. And they've learned to organise, at least a little. Some of them have also made choices about how they have evolved.' There are infected that have grown fat and slide along on all fours, like great slugs. There are infected whose genetic twists have allowed them to grow into titans.
And there is a third survivor: nature itself. 'We filmed in very remote places in the UK to try and achieve that look of a world that hasn't been turned over to agriculture,' says Boyle. 'England was all forest until we, as a species, began adapting it to our needs, clearing it to the point where there is very little of it now that isn't clearly manicured. But, of course, nature will return it to forest.'
Filming took place in woods in Northumberland, North Yorkshire and Scotland. Digital magic allows the film to show their coastlines as thickly wooded. 'It looks like Eden,' says Comer. 'It's the most beautiful thing to see on camera; when you're on location, it feels very freeing.' Some areas were not generally accessible. 'We were so lucky to be able to go there. There was a forest we filmed in where the forest floor was so thick with moss that it was bouncy like a mattress. It was the most magical place I had ever been. There were so many places we went to where you went 'wow, I would never have come here for a holiday'. That's the beauty of the job.'
The film is planned as the first of a trilogy. The second instalment, The Bone Temple, has already been shot by Candyman director Nia DaCosta; the third script is on the way. All three storylines are shrouded in levels of mystery, although the eponymous bone temple of the second instalment appears in 28 Years Later.
The set, which took six months to build, consists of 250,000 replica bones and 5500 skulls. It is the work of a doctor, Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes); Spike makes the risky journey to see Kelson with Isla in the hope that, despite his lack of actual medicines, he may be able to help her. Kelson has collected the femurs and skulls of the dead – both the infected and their victims – to build a monument to their passing.
This great ossuary is a place of reflection and memory, which Boyle associates with a heart-covered Covid memory wall in London. 'It's got a power to it that is fundamental and the reasons for it being built are also fundamental to the humanity of the piece, I think,' he says. 'It is a horror film, but there are elements in it that are very moving.'
Skulls are a visual shorthand in horror films, supposed to induce shivers. 'But it is also a reminder, as we know from many, many cultures, of our common humanity when everything is stripped away.' The memento mori, which obliges us to recognise that death comes to us all, embodies acceptance.
Boyle has been careful to describe 28 Years Later as a film about family – about parenthood, a boy taking responsibility for the mother who can no longer look after him, about the strain that illness puts on a marriage – but it also fits squarely within the horror genre. It is a genre that is currently more popular than ever.
'I'm told one of the reasons it has expanded and grown is because women have become much more interested in it,' says Boyle. 'That's what the figures tell the studios, apparently. I find that fascinating.
'But I think horror is fascinating for all of us, because it gets our fears and looks at them acutely. Also you have a freedom in the genre that's really exciting to work in, I have to say.' Horror is inherently dramatic 'which is what you want cinema to be', but it can be funny, playful or emotionally complex. Comer felt she was seeing art being made, where there was concentrated intention behind every shot.
'I think Danny has delivered something really quite surprising, within the genre but deeply moving and very intimate and sombre and tender in moments,' she says. 'It really isn't what you expect it's going to be. And that's no small feat.'
Loading
28 Years Later opens in cinemas on June 19.