Jodie Comer has paid a heartfelt Jodie Comer Casualty tribute, crediting the long-running BBC drama with shaping her earliest years as a performer, as the show prepares to mark its 40th anniversary with a special double bill.
‘Those roles are so fundamental’: Comer on her Casualty beginnings
Appearing on The One Show earlier this week, Comer was asked to reflect on her time in the soap in honour of its four decades on television. She did not hesitate. ‘It was one of my early jobs,’ she said. ‘Those roles are so kind of fundamental to you starting out and learning everything about being on a set and obviously now the more work that you do it’s those kind of roles you look back on with a kind of awe.’
She also touched on how much those early credits meant to the people closest to her. ‘They’re the kind of roles that your family probably celebrated more than what you do now because they felt so major.’ It is the kind of candid, grounded reflection that is easy to believe from someone who clearly remembers where she started.
That starting point came in 2012, when a 19-year-old Comer appeared in a Casualty episode titled ‘I’ll See You in My Dreams.’ She played Maddy Eldon, the teenage daughter of a family brought into the emergency department after the father suffers a fractured skull. It is a blink-and-you-miss-it moment by today’s standards, but those are precisely the credits that quietly matter.
Casualty, it turns out, has a track record of producing those moments. The show is a 4-time BAFTA winner, a record that speaks to a programme which has consistently punched above the weight of its Saturday-night scheduling across four decades of television.
The 40th anniversary double bill and what Casualty bosses are promising
The Jodie Comer Casualty tribute comes at a particularly charged moment for the show. Tonight’s 40th anniversary double bill airs on Saturday 5 September on BBC One and BBC iPlayer, where episodes are released at 6am on the day of transmission, and the team behind it has been talking up what viewers can expect.
Melanie Hill, who plays Siobhan McKenzie, previously told Digital Spy: ‘I would like the viewers who maybe haven’t seen Casualty before to keep watching, because we keep raising the bar. These are very different episodes, obviously there is much bigger CGI involved. But as well as that, we continue to tell really human stories that everyone can identify with, and the scripts that we’re working on now just get better and better.’
The promise of bigger spectacle alongside the human-scale storytelling the show has always traded on is a neat summary of what has kept Casualty on air longer than most of its peers. For new viewers arriving via the anniversary coverage, that is a decent pitch. For long-term fans, it is probably already a given.
From Casualty to The Death of Robin Hood
Comer, meanwhile, is some distance from those early Saturday-night shifts in the Casualty emergency department. She is currently starring alongside Hugh Jackman in A24‘s The Death of Robin Hood, which is out now in UK cinemas.
The film follows an aged Robin Hood, played by Jackman, who is tormented by his life of crime and murder. After being gravely injured in battle, he finds refuge in a Priory on a remote island, where he bonds with healer Sister Brigid, the role Comer takes on. It is a long way, in every sense, from a 2012 guest slot in a hospital drama, and Comer’s own words suggest she is fully aware of that distance, and grateful for where it all began.
Casualty’s 40th anniversary double bill airs tonight on BBC One, with both episodes also available on BBC iPlayer from 6am on the day of transmission.
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