Seeing women killers on TV ‘is empowering’
BBC’s star writer says viewers ‘tired’ of female victims
WaTCHInG women kill others rather than be killed themselves is ‘empowering’, one of the BBC’s star writers has claimed.
Phoebe Waller- Bridge, who wrote the broadcaster’s hit series Killing Eve, said viewers were tired of seeing women being ‘brutalised’ on television.
The globally successful drama followed a violent female assassin, played by British actress Jodie Comer, in a sexually- charged game of cat and mouse with an MI5 officer, played by Sandra Oh – who won a Golden Globe for her performance.
‘I think people are slightly exhausted by seeing women being brutalised on screen,’ the writer told the andrew Marr Show yesterday.
‘We’re being allowed to see women on slabs the whole time and being beaten up, and in some ways that’s important to see because it shows the brutality against women. Seeing women being violent, the flipside of that, is refreshing and oddly empowering.’ Miss Waller-Bridge said the dark thriller, which is set to return next month, contains ‘hardly any blood’. ‘Strangely, there’s hardly any gruesomeness that we were allowed to show,’ she said. ‘There’s a man on the slab but no bits on show. We have just as much respect the other way around. BBC america, the original channel, said we couldn’t have that much blood on show, we couldn’t be too grotesque.
‘The challenge was to make it feel very violent without actually showing anything.’
Miss Waller-Bridge, 33, also co-created and stars in the popular BBC comedy Fleabag, which returned for a second series last Monday.
She plays a sex-obsessed, selfaware young woman living in London – but admitted she was worried feminists would criticise her for saying things ‘you’re not supposed to say’. ‘a lot of women, and probably some men as well, feel like they could fall into a trap of being a bad feminist,’ she said.
‘ Which is somebody who doesn’t tick all the boxes of what it is to be a perfect feminist or be a perfect spokeswoman for the cause.’
She added: ‘There are so many potholes in the road. It’s kind of frightening and you want to be able to say the right things.’