Jodie Comer got plenty of experience as an assassin in her Emmy-winning performance in “Killing Eve,” but for her new musical romance “Stuffed” she learned an entirely different skill: taxidermy.
“There was a lot of real taxidermy on set. I also did a very small taxidermy course in Portsmouth, which was so invaluable to understand her and comprehend her desire and what her relationship to that was,” Comer told Jada Yuan at TheWrap’s studio at the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival. “The world is so rich, the texture of the set design and the props, and getting to see her workshop for the first time, it was so alive.”
The story centers on Araminta (Comer) and Bernie (Harry Melling), who develop an unexpected love story over taxidermy, and Comer added that the course shaped how she understood her character’s psychology.
“When I was literally handling this animal, peeling back the skin, holding the ligaments, I was struck by the similarity,” Comer said. “I feel like she would really recognize herself within that. It wasn’t as outlandish to her as most people would think. I’ve thought of her as an artist who’s done everything else and is craving something more, which on a fundamental level is actually very relatable.”
Set against a darkly macabre backdrop, the film is at once a musical, horror and romance.
“Stuffed” hails from writer and director Theo Rhys marking his feature debut. The film expands on Rhys’ short of the same name, which won the Midnight Jury and Audience Awards at the SXSW Film Festival back in 2021 and earned a BAFTA nomination in 2022.
Melling said that when Rhys sent the script, he also sent recordings of Joss Holden-Rea singing all the songs so that when he got to a song in the script, he could push play and listen to it before reading on.
“It was a very unique way of experiencing something for the first time. I remember getting right to the end of the script and just saying to myself, ‘Okay, this has to happen somehow.’ Just because it was such a unique adventure and, even from the short that these guys made, it was such a specific world that I wanted to be involved in somehow.”
Holden-Rea noted that outside of “La La Land,” original musicals don’t seem to get made often.
“I don’t know if we’ve wholly found a place where it’s just a medium in which you can explore different genres and stuff like that, and that is kind of self-contained. But I think there’s definitely like an appetite for it for sure,” they said.
Rhys and Holden-Rea met in college and were specifically looking to make a musical together when they hit upon the story of “Stuffed.”
“When you’re looking for a story that is suitable for a musical, you need something that has the grand emotional stakes of death, of love, of this idea of finding meaning in the world,” Rhys said. “So there’s so much within this that feels so heightened already that I think it lends itself naturally to the heightened form of a musical.”
The film had its world premiere on Thursday at TIFF and Comer was actually caught off guard by the audience’s reaction.
“It was amazing to feel how responsive people were. There was a lot of humor,” Comer said. “There’s a moment with Bernie where he’s claiming himself, and you could just feel the audience going, ‘Yes, Bernie.’ The whole audience erupted in this huge round of applause.”
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