‘It’s anarchic’: the cast of Killing Eve on Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s killer
The show that Ridley Scott described as a threat to the movie industry hits UK screens this week. Its stars Sandra Oh and Jodie Comer talk about anoraks, assassins and female brutality
Sat 15 Sep 2018 10.00 BST
All about Eve... Jodie Comer and Sandra Oh. Photograph: BBC/Sid Gentle Films/Jason BellKilling Eve is the kind of show that demands you discuss its finer details. Sandra Oh plays the Eve of the title, a dishevelled MI5 employee who ends up hunting a brutally efficient assassin. Oh humours me as I pick apart the show’s symbolic wardrobe choices, including Eve Polastri’s dowdy anorak. “A couple of things,” she begins, kindly. “That anorak is actually mine … ”
Killing Eve: how my psycho killer was brought to life
Read moreWhoops. “I was like: I’m just going to bring my clothes that have real holes in them, that thing that I bought for that trip to Peru, many years ago. It is a pretty sad raincoat,” she agrees. Oh is a producer on the show, which aired in the US on BBC America in April and earned two Emmy award nominations. It represents Oh’s first substantial TV role since she left Grey’s Anatomy in 2014, having played fan favourite Cristina Yang for almost a decade. It’s easy to see why the part appealed. The opening scene lays out the wickedly funny tone, as Villanelle, the assassin in Eve’s sights, watches a little girl eating ice-cream, playfully copying her facial expressions. Villanelle looks down to see a spot of blood on her watch. It’s time to go. As she leaves, she locks eyes with the kid, and knocks the ice-cream all over her. On purpose.
“That first episode was so cracking, in such special ways, from Villanelle’s introduction of the ice-cream, and then you see Eve bumbling along,” says Oh, who spent six months in London filming the first season, and seems to have picked up a few of her character’s British-isms along the way. “Immediately I felt connected to Phoebe’s writing and I could recognise that the tone was special and new and tricky. I was like: ‘Whoa, what was that?’”
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View from Bridge… Jodie Comer and Sandra Oh in Killing Eve. Photograph: BBC/Sid Gentle Films/Robert ViglaskySign up to our Film Today email
Read morePhoebe is Phoebe Waller-Bridge, and Killing Eve is her first TV show since Fleabag went from buzzy fringe theatre hit to the BBC Three comedy that made her name and set her on a path to Star Wars. It is an adaptation of a series of novellas by Luke Jennings, but it’s also full of the kind of dry observations and dark humour that fans of Fleabag will have come to recognise; one of its best jokes is that it’s often hard not to admire Villanelle, or even want to be her, just a bit, despite all the deceit and violence and murdering.
On the surface, then, Killing Eve is a spy thriller, but it is also a black comedy that plays with the conventions of the genre, not to parody them so much as hold them up to the light. It is so good that when Ridley Scott said he loved it, he added that shows of its calibre represented a real threat to the movie industry. When Killing Eve’s actors talk about its tone, they draw on literary references, rather than TV ones. Oh likens Waller-Bridge to Jonathan Franzen. Fiona Shaw, who plays government bigwig Carolyn Martens, says she reminds her of Restoration playwright William Congreve.
Sally Woodward Gentle, the show’s executive producer, says she optioned the rights to Jennings’s novellas almost immediately after reading them. “Luke’s got a really intelligent take on women, and a really intelligent take on the genre,” she said. “But I also thought, there’s Nikita out there, there’s loads of stuff that feels in this genre, so it would be interesting to have a very different perspective on it.” She remembered reading a play called Fleabag and signed Waller-Bridge up as that different perspective, long before Fleabag was being earmarked for TV. “She’s got an odd, idiosyncratic, interesting voice. Essentially, she’s not that interested in genre; she’s interested in relationships, and the complexity of relationships. She’s also really funny and can be silly and absurd. She’s always looking for stuff that feels original, but at the same time can punch you in the gut.”
FacebookTwitterPinterestOne of the difficulties of talking about Killing Eve right now is that it was on in the US back in April, so any conversations must dodge spoilers like the cast members dodge bullets. Oh is apologetic about the gap. “I will say, in the land of social media, you’d better block all of it if you want to actually have the genuine experience of discovering it,” she laughs. But it’s worth the sacrifice. Eve finds herself obsessed with Villanelle, whose kills have become increasingly prolific and bold; in one early scene, Eve explains to her husband in a disturbing amount of detail how she might bump him off and dispose of his body, should the need arise. Unlikely as it first seems, with her moth-eaten anorak and tendency towards feeding her hangover with crumbling croissants during high-security briefings, Eve is put in charge of tracking her down. A ridiculously enjoyable chase around Europe ensues, and the relationship between spy and assassin develops into something you could almost call devoted. It is as bewitching as it is thrilling.
It also gets under your skin. Like Fleabag, the drama is funny where it shouldn’t be, and serious when you expect a laugh. As the lauded MI5 boss Carolyn, Shaw is ultimately in charge of the mission to find Villanelle. She says that, initially, the unusual tone was hard to grasp. “I thought: ‘This is so hard, surely I’m going to laugh in a minute.’ And to not laugh, and to let the thing hang [means] it has this knife edge of being slightly serious and weird,” she says.
Part of the joy of the series lies in the psychopathic Villanelle, by turns charming and terrifying, a petulant toddler of a woman who does whatever she wants to do, whenever she wants to do it – and most of the time, she wants to kill people. Jodie Comer says she had doubts about being able to take her on. “I’d originally seen the word ‘assassin’ and was like: ‘Pfft, it’s not me. I don’t know if it’s in me,’” she says, disarmingly sweetly, her native Liverpudlian accent a surprise to those who have become accustomed to Villanelle’s Russian-French hybrid. “The femme fatale kind of thing, it definitely doesn’t come naturally.” Her fears proved unfounded. After a chemistry read with Oh (true to type, Oh brought props, including a blueberry pie, for reasons that become clear later in the series), she landed the part, and it’s an extraordinary, career-making turn. “I read the script and it just totally went against every single thing I thought it was going to be,” Comer says.
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Killing me softly... Comer and Oh. Photograph: BBC America/Everett CollectionThe complex relationship between Eve and Villanelle is at the centre of the show, though who is the hunter and who is being hunted is constantly being flipped on its head. Whether their connection is driven by fear or admiration or a need for justice, or even love, is never entirely obvious, and neither Comer nor Oh want to spoil it with much speculation. “I like mucking about in the mystery of it,” says Oh. “To define it is to make it too small. But I think it’s clear that they each holds something that is deeply missing in the other. Eve is kind of our everywoman, and the idea of a young, strong, vibrant person, who flagrantly does what she wants, I think Eve needs that very much in her life.”
Eve is settled, married, and becoming increasingly aware of the fact that she’s also growing bored. Oh says she relates to that period of life. “As an actress who is in my mid-life, I’m very interested in that,” she says. “As women, in this beautiful mid-life place, have we gotten a little tired? Have things slowed down, have things not become so bright? How do you tap back into your vitality, of which she has so much?” For Eve, Villanelle offers a solution. She has no interest in even the most fundamental of moral codes; her behaviour is driven completely by impulse. She delights in examining, and then upending, every rule she can find. She can do things with hair grips that would make your eyes water, and she really likes to dress up for a party.
Shaw thinks that Killing Eve’s fascination with amorality is another key to its power. “There’s no virtue in it, so it’s women not being virtuous. It’s fantastic to have an antiheroine like Villanelle, doing all the things you might think, but never dare to do. And she succeeds! That’s really exciting. It’s like liking the devil, isn’t it? But there’s no consequence to it. She always comes out fine, and everyone dies. I think it’s playful, and really anarchic.”
Almost every crucial character in the drama is a woman; a number of early reviews suggested it was a “gender flip” story in which women took on the roles typically played by men within this genre, although most also agreed that it was much more than a simple gimmick. Oh is cautious of being overly analytical: “I don’t want it to get didactic, I think that’s quite dangerous.” But she does point out that having a show filled with women, with actors who aren’t all white, is what she calls “creating new images. I want to be part of creating new images. That has the effect of, when you see that person again and again and again [on TV], the next person you see at the store [who looks like that] you might not hate them.” She laughs, hard. “That’s what I’m trying to do.”
Oh, Shaw and Comer are about to start work on season two. Comer’s just had her hair dyed back to its Villanelle brown, although the change didn’t stop her from being recognised during the filming break. (“I was at a festival in Spain and people kept coming up to me, all saying ‘Villanelle!’ I was like: how does everyone know about Villanelle? Apparently it’s on over there.”) Oh almost tells me where she’s flying off to, before she realises that even the filming location might be a spoiler. I ask her what she can tell me about what’s to come in season two, which was commissioned before the first episode even went out. “I don’t think you want to know, honestly,” she shrugs. “I can tell. You don’t really want to know, so I’m not going to tell you.” Annoyingly, she’s right. Killing Eve is the kind of show that asks you to take its hand and trust it, even if you don’t know where it’s going to take you. But doesn’t that sound like exactly the kind of thing Villanelle might say?
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2018/sep/15/the-cast-of-killing-eve-on-phoebe-waller-bridge-psycho-killer-thriller
Sat 15 Sep 2018 10.00 BST
All about Eve... Jodie Comer and Sandra Oh. Photograph: BBC/Sid Gentle Films/Jason BellKilling Eve is the kind of show that demands you discuss its finer details. Sandra Oh plays the Eve of the title, a dishevelled MI5 employee who ends up hunting a brutally efficient assassin. Oh humours me as I pick apart the show’s symbolic wardrobe choices, including Eve Polastri’s dowdy anorak. “A couple of things,” she begins, kindly. “That anorak is actually mine … ”
Killing Eve: how my psycho killer was brought to life
Read moreWhoops. “I was like: I’m just going to bring my clothes that have real holes in them, that thing that I bought for that trip to Peru, many years ago. It is a pretty sad raincoat,” she agrees. Oh is a producer on the show, which aired in the US on BBC America in April and earned two Emmy award nominations. It represents Oh’s first substantial TV role since she left Grey’s Anatomy in 2014, having played fan favourite Cristina Yang for almost a decade. It’s easy to see why the part appealed. The opening scene lays out the wickedly funny tone, as Villanelle, the assassin in Eve’s sights, watches a little girl eating ice-cream, playfully copying her facial expressions. Villanelle looks down to see a spot of blood on her watch. It’s time to go. As she leaves, she locks eyes with the kid, and knocks the ice-cream all over her. On purpose.
“That first episode was so cracking, in such special ways, from Villanelle’s introduction of the ice-cream, and then you see Eve bumbling along,” says Oh, who spent six months in London filming the first season, and seems to have picked up a few of her character’s British-isms along the way. “Immediately I felt connected to Phoebe’s writing and I could recognise that the tone was special and new and tricky. I was like: ‘Whoa, what was that?’”
FacebookTwitterPinterest
View from Bridge… Jodie Comer and Sandra Oh in Killing Eve. Photograph: BBC/Sid Gentle Films/Robert ViglaskySign up to our Film Today email
Read morePhoebe is Phoebe Waller-Bridge, and Killing Eve is her first TV show since Fleabag went from buzzy fringe theatre hit to the BBC Three comedy that made her name and set her on a path to Star Wars. It is an adaptation of a series of novellas by Luke Jennings, but it’s also full of the kind of dry observations and dark humour that fans of Fleabag will have come to recognise; one of its best jokes is that it’s often hard not to admire Villanelle, or even want to be her, just a bit, despite all the deceit and violence and murdering.
On the surface, then, Killing Eve is a spy thriller, but it is also a black comedy that plays with the conventions of the genre, not to parody them so much as hold them up to the light. It is so good that when Ridley Scott said he loved it, he added that shows of its calibre represented a real threat to the movie industry. When Killing Eve’s actors talk about its tone, they draw on literary references, rather than TV ones. Oh likens Waller-Bridge to Jonathan Franzen. Fiona Shaw, who plays government bigwig Carolyn Martens, says she reminds her of Restoration playwright William Congreve.
Sally Woodward Gentle, the show’s executive producer, says she optioned the rights to Jennings’s novellas almost immediately after reading them. “Luke’s got a really intelligent take on women, and a really intelligent take on the genre,” she said. “But I also thought, there’s Nikita out there, there’s loads of stuff that feels in this genre, so it would be interesting to have a very different perspective on it.” She remembered reading a play called Fleabag and signed Waller-Bridge up as that different perspective, long before Fleabag was being earmarked for TV. “She’s got an odd, idiosyncratic, interesting voice. Essentially, she’s not that interested in genre; she’s interested in relationships, and the complexity of relationships. She’s also really funny and can be silly and absurd. She’s always looking for stuff that feels original, but at the same time can punch you in the gut.”
FacebookTwitterPinterestOne of the difficulties of talking about Killing Eve right now is that it was on in the US back in April, so any conversations must dodge spoilers like the cast members dodge bullets. Oh is apologetic about the gap. “I will say, in the land of social media, you’d better block all of it if you want to actually have the genuine experience of discovering it,” she laughs. But it’s worth the sacrifice. Eve finds herself obsessed with Villanelle, whose kills have become increasingly prolific and bold; in one early scene, Eve explains to her husband in a disturbing amount of detail how she might bump him off and dispose of his body, should the need arise. Unlikely as it first seems, with her moth-eaten anorak and tendency towards feeding her hangover with crumbling croissants during high-security briefings, Eve is put in charge of tracking her down. A ridiculously enjoyable chase around Europe ensues, and the relationship between spy and assassin develops into something you could almost call devoted. It is as bewitching as it is thrilling.
It also gets under your skin. Like Fleabag, the drama is funny where it shouldn’t be, and serious when you expect a laugh. As the lauded MI5 boss Carolyn, Shaw is ultimately in charge of the mission to find Villanelle. She says that, initially, the unusual tone was hard to grasp. “I thought: ‘This is so hard, surely I’m going to laugh in a minute.’ And to not laugh, and to let the thing hang [means] it has this knife edge of being slightly serious and weird,” she says.
Part of the joy of the series lies in the psychopathic Villanelle, by turns charming and terrifying, a petulant toddler of a woman who does whatever she wants to do, whenever she wants to do it – and most of the time, she wants to kill people. Jodie Comer says she had doubts about being able to take her on. “I’d originally seen the word ‘assassin’ and was like: ‘Pfft, it’s not me. I don’t know if it’s in me,’” she says, disarmingly sweetly, her native Liverpudlian accent a surprise to those who have become accustomed to Villanelle’s Russian-French hybrid. “The femme fatale kind of thing, it definitely doesn’t come naturally.” Her fears proved unfounded. After a chemistry read with Oh (true to type, Oh brought props, including a blueberry pie, for reasons that become clear later in the series), she landed the part, and it’s an extraordinary, career-making turn. “I read the script and it just totally went against every single thing I thought it was going to be,” Comer says.
FacebookTwitterPinterest
Killing me softly... Comer and Oh. Photograph: BBC America/Everett CollectionThe complex relationship between Eve and Villanelle is at the centre of the show, though who is the hunter and who is being hunted is constantly being flipped on its head. Whether their connection is driven by fear or admiration or a need for justice, or even love, is never entirely obvious, and neither Comer nor Oh want to spoil it with much speculation. “I like mucking about in the mystery of it,” says Oh. “To define it is to make it too small. But I think it’s clear that they each holds something that is deeply missing in the other. Eve is kind of our everywoman, and the idea of a young, strong, vibrant person, who flagrantly does what she wants, I think Eve needs that very much in her life.”
Eve is settled, married, and becoming increasingly aware of the fact that she’s also growing bored. Oh says she relates to that period of life. “As an actress who is in my mid-life, I’m very interested in that,” she says. “As women, in this beautiful mid-life place, have we gotten a little tired? Have things slowed down, have things not become so bright? How do you tap back into your vitality, of which she has so much?” For Eve, Villanelle offers a solution. She has no interest in even the most fundamental of moral codes; her behaviour is driven completely by impulse. She delights in examining, and then upending, every rule she can find. She can do things with hair grips that would make your eyes water, and she really likes to dress up for a party.
Shaw thinks that Killing Eve’s fascination with amorality is another key to its power. “There’s no virtue in it, so it’s women not being virtuous. It’s fantastic to have an antiheroine like Villanelle, doing all the things you might think, but never dare to do. And she succeeds! That’s really exciting. It’s like liking the devil, isn’t it? But there’s no consequence to it. She always comes out fine, and everyone dies. I think it’s playful, and really anarchic.”
Almost every crucial character in the drama is a woman; a number of early reviews suggested it was a “gender flip” story in which women took on the roles typically played by men within this genre, although most also agreed that it was much more than a simple gimmick. Oh is cautious of being overly analytical: “I don’t want it to get didactic, I think that’s quite dangerous.” But she does point out that having a show filled with women, with actors who aren’t all white, is what she calls “creating new images. I want to be part of creating new images. That has the effect of, when you see that person again and again and again [on TV], the next person you see at the store [who looks like that] you might not hate them.” She laughs, hard. “That’s what I’m trying to do.”
Oh, Shaw and Comer are about to start work on season two. Comer’s just had her hair dyed back to its Villanelle brown, although the change didn’t stop her from being recognised during the filming break. (“I was at a festival in Spain and people kept coming up to me, all saying ‘Villanelle!’ I was like: how does everyone know about Villanelle? Apparently it’s on over there.”) Oh almost tells me where she’s flying off to, before she realises that even the filming location might be a spoiler. I ask her what she can tell me about what’s to come in season two, which was commissioned before the first episode even went out. “I don’t think you want to know, honestly,” she shrugs. “I can tell. You don’t really want to know, so I’m not going to tell you.” Annoyingly, she’s right. Killing Eve is the kind of show that asks you to take its hand and trust it, even if you don’t know where it’s going to take you. But doesn’t that sound like exactly the kind of thing Villanelle might say?
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2018/sep/15/the-cast-of-killing-eve-on-phoebe-waller-bridge-psycho-killer-thriller