Killing Eve’s new showrunner Emerald Fennell has suggested that even the show’s main characters Villanelle and Eve could “die in any episode.”
Speaking to Variety, Fennell, revealed that she didn’t want viewers to assume that the leads would be “fine,” as “no one should feel safe.”
The author and actress, who is set to star as a young Camilla Parker Bowles in the forthcoming third series of Netflix’s The Crown, has taken over writing duties for Killing Eve’s second season so that creator Phoebe Waller Bridge can focus on other projects.
“I never wanted that thing that you often have with famous thriller characters, which is, ‘they’ll all be fine!’” she told the publication.
“I think it’s really important to say, “Okay well if this is a fight to the death, and demonstrably it is with what happened last [season], no one should feel safe.”
She cited the murder of Eve’s MI5 boss Frank in series one as an example, telling the magazine: “The brutality of that and the fact that you never look away from it – there is a sense that both of them are getting into stuff that’s properly deadly.”
“Otherwise we don’t believe it anymore,” she added.
Alluding to the show’s dramatic finale, which saw Villanelle (Jodie Comer) flee to Paris after Eve (Sandra Oh) stabbed her in the stomach, Fennell also gave fans a hint as to what they can expect from the new episodes.
“We couldn’t cheat around the fact that Villanelle is bleeding to death,” she said, before explaining that the second series will see the assassin attempting to recover from the near-deadly injury.
“In the end what we ended up doing was making a virtue of something that usually would be admin in any other thriller. In any other thriller it would have been about getting Villanelle back to her sexiest point again.”
Killing Eve series two will premiere on April 7 on BBC America, with a UK air date yet to be announced.
