IN CONVERSATION
Austin Butler and Jodie Comer let Total Film ride pillion as they talk smoking, stealing wardrobe and sexual chemistry on The Bikeriders.
There’s a moment in Jeff Nichols’ 60s-set hymn to open roads, purring carburettors and bad boys in leather jackets where Jodie Comer’s Kathy reluctantly gets on the back of a gleaming Harley belonging to Austin Butler’s wildcard biker Benny. As she clings to his denim jacket and he guns the hog over the rise of a highway bridge at midnight, his gang appears behind them, headlamps twinkling, engines roaring, while The Shangri-Las duskily sing, ‘Out in the street’... It’s an image and feeling seemingly transposed directly from the pages of Danny Lyon’s seminal photobook, The Bikeriders – a tome Nichols discovered on the floor of his brother’s bedroom as a teen and has been hankering to make into a film ever since.
‘It was the most complete view of a subculture I’d ever seen,’ he told Total Film in October last year. ‘It honestly felt like ingredients or instructions to go and make a movie.’
It’s also a scene that marks the liminal moment Kathy – and audiences – buy into the inherent coolness of bikers and the seductive lure of Benny, a man she’ll fight to keep when gang leader Johnny (Tom Hardy) exerts his own pull on him. Audiences in Telluride, where the film premiered last year, were certainly along for the ride as reviews praised the consolidation of Comer and Butler as bona fide movie stars – her flexing an awards-worthy idiolectic Chicago accent and him smoking, literally and figuratively. Unable to promote the film at the time due to strikes, both actors arrive in New York City at the end of April to beat the drum for a movie that has now moved distributor and release date. They sit down with Total Film to unpick the timeless attraction of on-screen bikers that has fascinated movie fans since Marlon Brando popped on the leathers…
Austin, you actively went after this role post-Elvis. And Jodie, Jeff Nichols said he felt you would take care of Kathy. What drew you both to the project?
Austin Butler: For one, I was a fan of Jeff’s beforehand, all the way back to Shotgun Stories and Take Shelter and Midnight Special. And then reading the script, and that feeling of nostalgia that I got of movies of the 60s –I hadn’t read a script like it. And just knowing the Americana feeling that comes out of Jeff’s films so clearly. So, I was really excited by it, and by Benny – and the enigma and the mystery that he is.
Jodie Comer: I just fell in love with Kathy. I felt like I understood her and there was something about her, the way in which she carried herself, that I felt I had witnessed in many women in my life. Especially like when I t
