Jodie Comer was ‘terrified’ acting with 15 babies in The End We Start From
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Jodie Comer has said she was “terrified” while acting with 15 babies during the shoot of her new climate change survival film.
In The End We Start From, Comer, 30, plays a mother fighting for survival amid civil unrest and widespread flooding while caring for her newborn baby.
The film follows her character, referred to simply as Woman, as she flees her home in London for the safety of her parents’ house in the countryside amid scenes of anarchy and widespread shortages of food and medicine.
Comer described how she worked with 15 infants, aged eight weeks to toddlers during shooting.
Owing to on-set rules, each child was only allowed to be part of a scene for 20 minutes at a time so more than a dozen children were needed to finish the film.
She told the BBC: “I started this process quite literally terrified. My hands were visibly shaking when I met an eight week old on set. I was like, ‘Oh my god, what have I done?’
“It’s one thing to act and think about everything else, but then actually being conscious of this precious little being and making sure that they’re safe...”
‘I’m very lucky to have Jodie’
Comer said she had to channel her maternal instincts throughout the six week shoot as she appears with a baby in almost every scene.
She added: “People always say nothing can prepare you for having a child, and that’s very much where Woman started.
“But then you see her come into her own and find her instincts and nature. It felt like that simultaneously happened to me in real time.”
Mahalia Belo, the director, praised Comer’s temperament and conceded that the logistics of the shoot were challenging.
Belo told BBC: “I was very lucky to have Jodie because it was so difficult. We had no time with the babies, so to have somebody who was really present, alive to the material and any shifts we had to make – we would never have got through it if it wasn’t for that tenacity.”
If the crew could not capture a key scene because a baby was crying, a dummy baby was sometimes used if time was short.
Depicting the flooding was also an issue because there was a hosepipe ban while filming was taking place in September and October 2022.
“We couldn’t use rain machines until the hosepipe ban was over,” Belo told BBC but they were able to proceed once the ban was lifted.
The film was adapted by Alice Birch from the lyrical novella The End We Start From by Megan Hunter. Ms Birch co-wrote the BBC drama Normal People, an adaptation of Sally Rooney’s novel.
The End We Start From will be on screen in UK cinemas from Friday.
