Oh, Comer help steer the course of Killing Eve

REVIEW

Killing Eve

Sundays, CTV Drama

Note: This story discusses plot points from the season 3

première of Killing Eve.

The second season of Killing Eve left the fate of its protagonists up in the air. After teaming up to take down a ruthless billionaire, restless MI6 agent Eve Polastri (Sandra Oh) and glamorous assassin Villanelle (Jodie Comer) discovered they were each betrayed by their respective employers and, after confronting one another about the nature of their relationship, wound up at odds as well. A scorned Villanelle shot Eve with the intent to kill and walked away from the scene.

Of course, BBC America had already renewed the series for another season. As many assumed, Eve survived. But the circumstances in which we find her six months later are rather unexpected.

The third season, which premièred Sunday, picks up with Eve living alone in a cramped London apartment and working in the kitchen of a Korean restaurant. She sculpts mandu, or dumplings, and repeatedly refuses her boss’s offers to work at the front of the house.

“For me — and I think for a lot of people, particularly Asian people — making dumplings is a very, very grounding thing,” says Oh, born of South Korean immigrants in Nepean, Ont., near Ottawa. “She’s in the back of the restaurant. She wants to be anonymous. She wants to be left alone. There was something in the symbol of making the mandu that I felt like was a hurrah for selfcare. Because you see her also in the comfort of her mother language.”

Oh was the one to suggest the restaurant setting, one of many ways she has shaped Eve’s path. Originally helmed by creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Killing Eve has traded hands each season. Emerald Fennell took over as showrunner for the second season and Suzanne Heathcote is in charge of the third. As such, Oh and Comer have become the pre-eminent experts on Eve’s and Villanelle’s evolving psyches.

“Phoebe really built the foundation,” Oh says, “but the spine of the show is the cast, who has never changed.” Comer echoes the sentiment from her family home in Liverpool, adding the consistency has given her a confidence she hasn’t always felt on other sets: “I have an ease in knowing I know (Villanelle) more than anyone else now.”

Comer agrees Villanelle can still be “really outrageous and flamboyant,” but with each season the psychology behind her rash behaviour becomes more clear. What was once “bubbling under the surface” is increasingly externalized, Comer says.

Killing Eve thrives when it is most unpredictable. While Oh and Comer anchor the show, Oh says having new writers has the benefit of putting “more dynamic in the work process.”

“When you dance with chaos, when you are able to work with it, something new can happen,” Oh says.