Rage. That’s what Jodie Comer has been thinking about lately.

“I’ve always felt as if rage is something that I struggle to conjure up,” the actor says, within minutes of sitting down. We’re in a dark Austrian restaurant, below the head of a taxidermied boar mounted on a wooden shield. It feels like we’re in the belly of a ship. Outside, in London, it’s spring; on the way here, Comer bought a bunch of cream-coloured daffodils, and is glowing in crisp yellow and white cotton. But here among the wild animal trophies, the first thing on her mind is rage. Why women bury it. What it means when they do.

“I’ve realised my own [rage] just immediately goes to a very emotional place – my anger can so quickly go to tears. I think I swallow it as well,” she says. “I think, as women, we suppress it and that’s probably why I have trouble accessing it – I’ve done that so much that it feels kind of foreign, like I’m not quite sure where to pull it from.”

In her new film, the long-awaited post-apocalyptic horror sequel 28 Years Later, a virus called “rage” has obliterated the country. Comer’s character lives on a remote island accessible only by a causeway in the few hours the tide allows. Amid the hysteria and the mayhem and the uncertainty, one thing is clear: rage is a virus to be avoided. Rage is death. But Comer isn’t bringing this up now, over chicken schnitzel, as some neat tie-in to her film: it’s less ferocity she wants to unleash, and more like the courage to speak her whole mind.

She’s deliberately scant on detail when she talks about an incident that made her realise something. It was a while back, when a man was leading a group acting class she was taking part in. “There was just an energy in the way he was leading the workshop that made us all feel a little uncomfortable,” she says, picking her words carefully. “We were all looking at each other as if to say, This doesn’t feel quite right, [but] it probably got to 15 minutes too long before someone said, ‘You know what, why don’t we leave this here?’ We all felt like we’d muted ourselves. We were stunned by it,” she says. It was a lesson for her. “It’s suppression. Can I? Should I? Those little moments that show up where I think, Wow, I let myself down.” She adds resolutely, “I’m just trying to honour myself a little bit more.”

Later, she brings up a line from a Self Esteem song that keeps playing in her mind.

“If I’m so empowered, why am I such a coward?”

Read more at British GQ.