The psychologist who worked on Killing Eve drew on prison work with psychopaths to help bring cold-blooded killer Villanelle to the screen.
Jodie Comer recently won a Bafta for her portrayal of the murderous hitwoman who despatches her targets wearing designer clothes.
The show returns to BBC One next month, following the runaway success of the first series written by Fleabag creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge.
Mark Freestone, a senior lecturer at the Centre for Psychiatry at Queen Mary University of London, worked with Waller-Bridge and Comer to ensure the main character was authentic.
He said her love of looking good in everything from a Dries Van Noten power suit to a pink Molly Goddard tulle dress was integral to the portrayal as he had worked with patients with a similar love of clothes.
The psychologist, who has also spent 15 years working with psychopaths in prisons, said Comer’s “charming and appealing” performance rang true.
“Psychopaths can often come across as very appealing people, not just because of their clarity of vision, but also they often have quite good dress sense like Villanelle who buys all these wonderful clothes,” he said.
“I worked with a case for many years where one of my patients had wanted to seduce his neighbour, which didn’t end well, but on the way he basically learned how to dress really, really well and started buying incredibly expensive clothes to match the ideal.”
Dr Freestone said he had met psychopathic “gangland killers” in prison and the way they attempted to manipulate him was reflected in the relationship between Villanelle and Eve, the intelligence agent played by Sandra Oh. He said: “It’s sort of like a cat and mouse game and I need this from you and you’re dangling it in front of me and giving me titbits to keep me coming along to the sessions but I’m never quite getting enough”.
As part of his work advising on the first two series of the show, he put together a medical report on the character as if she were a real patient and revealed she scored 32 on a 40-point psychopathy checklist, making her “a primary psychopath”.
He said: “One of the defining characteristics of psychopaths is they are not anxious at all about the things that you and I are anxious about, so Villanelle doesn’t seem to experience any anxiety about killing people or being caught and her dynamics with the security services is like a flirtatious relationship rather than something where there is a real threat to her.”
The second series starts on BBC One on June 8 with a double episode
