Nichols cast Comer in the role before he’d seen her Emmy-winning work on Killing Eve, and long before her one-woman Broadway show Prima Facie won her a Tony. Her Bikeriders performance as the outspoken Kathy has been the talk of Telluride. “Jodie’s a worker,” says Nichols who recalls that one day on set, she left her notes behind and he took a peek. “I realized that she had taken every word in the scene that she spoke and phonetically broken it down, and it just went on for pages, for pages, for pages. A lot of people can do hard work, but then she makes it invisible.”
Comer had the rest of the cast in awe too. Nichols recalls how in one of her first scenes with Hardy, she has to his character Johnny, who is president of the club, that she wants her husband Benny (played by Austin Butler) to belong to her. Nichols asked who wanted to shoot their part of the scene first, and Comer said she would. “She came in and it was like a double barrel shotgun to the chest,” says Nichols. “I think Tom at one point missed a line because we were all just kind of watching her do this thing.”
Nichols also cast Butler before the release of his breakout film Elvis, though Nichols had gotten an early look at the trailer. Benny is a brooding man of few words, but a dedicated member of the motorcycle club. “At this point in my career, I’ve been around a lot of famous people, and they all have an energy to them, they all have a charisma, and he definitely has it,” says Nichols. “It goes beyond just being a movie star. You just wanted to be with him.”
Benny is in a lot of ways desired by both Kathy and Danny, who want so much for him and put their desires on him. “He’s a bit of an empty vessel,” says Nichols, who says he can’t wait to work with Butler again. “I know there’s more gears there.”
The biggest challenge for Nichols was stepping into a world that was so far from his own. He wasn’t even alive when these photos were taken, and he was not familiar with motorcycle culture. He and his actors studied the photos, audio files and did other research to get to know this subculture. And the actors went to motorcycle camp so they could ride with the confidence of a member of the club. “These bikes are 50, 60 years old. They’re not precision instruments at this point. They are very difficult bikes to ride,” he says.
The Bikeriders, which 20th Century Studios will release in theaters on Dec. 1, feels like a step back into time, and into a society created by and for outsiders. For Nichols, who hasn’t released a film since 2016, Bikeriders feels a bit like new territory for him too. “I’m really proud of this film and I think it does what I’ve set out to do, which is just dip you in this world and this feeling, the same feeling I got from these photos,” he says. Now he’s just got to learn to sit with the feeling of it being out in the real world, too.
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Rebecca Ford
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