When you work with Unicode, you should get greater character codes (>=255), not byte sequences, because Perl encapsulates encodings for you. For example,

use utf8;
binmode STDOUT, ":utf8";
my $string = "Queensrÿche ы";
printf "%x\t%s\n", ord($_), $_ for split "", $string;
__END__
51      Q
75      u
65      e
65      e
6e      n
73      s
72      r
ff      ÿ
63      c
68      h
65      e
20       
44b     ы

If you need to work with utf-8 bytes, encode them back:

use utf8;
use Encode 'encode';
binmode STDOUT, ":utf8";
my $string = "Queensrÿche ы";
printf "%x\t%s\n", ord($_), $_ for split "", encode utf8 => $string;
__END__
51      Q
75      u
65      e
65      e
6e      n
73      s
72      r
c3      Ã
bf      ¿
63      c
68      h
65      e
20       
d1      Ñ
8b

But there would be no point in using utf8 and Encode in this case.