Jodie Comer in talks to join Ridley Scott’s The Last Duel

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

After recently taking home the Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series, Variety has reported that Killing Eve star Jodie Comer is in talks to join the cast of Ridley Scott's THE LAST DUEL, a revenge story based on the novel by Eric Jager.

THE LAST DUEL is set to follow two best friends who will be played by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. "One goes to war and returns to discover the other has rapes the soldier’s wife. No one will believe the woman, and the soldier appeals to the king of France and says he wants to fight a duel to the death, and if the other guy wins, he is innocent. It becomes the last legally sanctioned duel in France." Should she sign on, Comer would the soldier's wife. Variety notes that THE LAST DUEL hasn't yet been greenlit as Disney/Fox is still figuring out how to move forward, but if it's approved, it's expected that the film could go into production in early 2020. Nicole Holofcener (ENOUGH SAID) is co-writing the script with Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, which marks the first collaboration on a script between Damon and Affleck since GOOD WILL HUNTING. 

A synopsis of "The Last Duel" via Amazon:

When Jean de Carrouges, a Norman knight, returns from combat in Scotland to find his wife, Marguerite, accusing Jacques LeGris, her husband’s old friend and fellow courtier, of brutally raping her, the knight takes his cause before the teenage King Charles VI. Amid LeGris’s vociferous claims of innocence and doubts about the now pregnant Marguerite’s charges (and about the paternity of her child), the deadlocked court decrees a “trial by combat” that leaves her fate, too, in the balance. For if her husband and champion loses the duel, she will be put to death as a false accuser.

Carrouges and LeGris, in full armor, eventually meet on a walled field in Paris before a massive crowd that includes the king and many nobles of the realm. A fierce fight on horseback and then on foot ensues during which both combatants suffer wounds—but only one fatal. The violent and tragic episode was notorious in its own time because of the nature of the alleged crime, the legal impasse it provoked, and the resulting trial by combat, an ancient but increasingly suspect institution that was thereafter abolished.

Jodie Comer will be reprising her role of Villanelle for the third season of Killing Eve, but she will also be starring alongside Ryan Reynolds in FREE GUY, a sci-fi/action/comedy which finds Reynolds starring as a bank teller who discovers that he's actually a background character living in an open-world video-game. Jodie Comer plays a character in the game by the name of Molotov Girl, as well as her real-world counterpart, the programmer who actually created the game but was devastated when it was stolen from her. FREE GUY is slated for a July 3, 2020 release.