Jodie Comer almost burned her eyelashes off preparing for her role in The Bikeriders

Jodie Comer singed her eyelashes when she was preparing for her role in the new film The Bikeriders. The actor bent over the gas hob on the stove to light up her cigarette — the same way that her character, Kathy, would do it — and then: whoosh.

Comer was adamant about getting Kathy's smoking habit right in the film. The character isn't just the fictional love interest of motorcycle gang member Benny (Austin Butler), but a real person. The Bikeriders is based on a 1968 photo book about the real-life motorcycle gang and the people around them.

"Kathy smokes cigarettes for breakfast," Comer tells Q's Tom Power. "Every image I saw of her, she was smoking. So it was something I took up at home as I was learning my dialogue."

Danny Lyon, the journalist who wrote and photographed The Bikeriders book, also included interviews with the gang members and other people, such as Kathy. Comer studied the photos of Kathy and listened to the archival tapes of interviews with her.

The actor found Kathy's Chicago accent to be the most important part of the tape. Comer, who hails from Liverpool, U.K., not only had to learn a Chicago accent for the role, but Kathy's version of it. Even her dialect coach, Victoria Hanlon, had trouble with the accent.

"She was like, 'She might be from Chicago, but every vowel sound is a complete contradiction. This is not a general Chicago accent,'" Comer recalls.

Hanlon asked Comer: do you want to do a Chicago accent or Kathy's accent?

"I want to emulate the audio because that to me was gold, and it's what drew me into her," Comer says. "It just felt like a shame not to explore that."

This isn't the first time that Comer has had to learn a complex accent. She won an Emmy for her ability to put on Russian, German, Italian and French accents while she played the multilingual assassin Villanelle on Killing Eve. 

She also received a Tony for her emotional performance on stage in Prima Facie, a one-woman show with 96 pages of dialogue, much of which deals with sexual assault.

Comer is often known as an "actor's actor" because of her ability to get so fully into character.

"I like that feeling of being slightly terrified and not necessarily knowing how you're going to do something, but committing to the cause anyway and putting the work in," she says. "And then at the end of it being like, 'I did that.'"

The full interview with Jodie Comer is available on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Interview with Jodie Comer produced by Vanessa Greco.