TV SERIES · 2018–
Killing Eve
35 archived facts 3 topics 1 source Last reviewed Oct 2026
All facts (35)
- #001
Jodie Comer was called to audition in Los Angeles with Sandra Oh while she was partying with friends at a music festival in Barcelona, Spain, and hungover. Although she thought her chances of landing the role were slim at best, she took a 13-hour flight to Los Angeles, and after reading with Sandra for five minutes the two clicked.
- #002
Sandra Oh said she had waited 30 years for a role this important. When she first read the script, however, she had no idea which part the producers wanted her for, since she assumed she would be a receptionist or a doctor, or a secondary role of the kind usually assigned to Asian actresses. Needless to say, she was overjoyed when her manager, Nancy Mendelson Gates, assured her she would be playing Eve.
- #003
Kenny (Sean Delaney) and Carolyn (Fiona Shaw) were not originally written as mother and son. Only three weeks into filming, Sandra Oh (Eve) noticed a resemblance between the two characters. This inspired Phoebe Waller-Bridge to make the two characters connected to each other.
- #004
Jodie Comer learned the foreign languages Villanelle speaks in the series by writing them out phonetically from a recording device and reading them aloud.
- #005
Fiona Shaw, who is Irish, initially wanted to play the character Carolyn Martens with an upper-class Irish accent, but the producers rejected her suggestion.
- #006
Sandra Oh said the most fun leg of filming took place in Bucharest, Romania. Whenever she had to do a driving scene and the low-loader equipment was blocked by parked cars, large Romanian men would appear and physically lift the cars onto the sidewalks to clear the road. A cacophony of car alarms always broke out, but the locals were unfazed by any of it.
- #007
In her interview on the Graham Norton show, Jodie Comer stated that Italian was her favorite language to speak over the course of the series because it was the easiest for her to learn.
- #008
The series' production team was eager to work with Sandra Oh but was told she would not be available. Phoebe Waller-Bridge wrote an email to Oh's manager stating that no one else could play Eve.
- #009
The pajamas Villanelle wears in the second season were made specifically for the series by costume designer Charlotte Mitchell. She used a fabric called "Comic Bubble Blue" and deliberately designed the pajamas to be too small to fit Jodie Comer.
- #010
When she first read the script and saw that it was created by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Jodie Comer, a big fan of Phoebe's acclaimed series Fleabag (2016), immediately threw her hat in the ring for the role. The two first met at a hotel after the 2017 BAFTAs, where Waller-Bridge won the award for Best Female Performance in a Comedy Programme for Fleabag (2016).
- #011
Jodie Comer is the only actor who appears in every episode.
- #012
Villanelle's name is also a reference to the Italian poetic form known as the villanelle (or villanesque). Jia Tolentino (The New Yorker) likened the whole of Killing Eve to the villanelle form, writing that the series is about "the repetition of a recognizable pattern, its pleasures emerging in the inner folds."
- #013
Series 1 body count = 27. Eighteen were killed by Villanelle in self-defense, one was a suicide, one was an accidental death, and six were killed by other characters.
- #014
Across the first and second seasons, Villanelle speaks seven different languages (French, German, Russian, Italian, Spanish, Dutch and Mandarin*) and four different accents (English^, Scottish, Australian and American). * However, during her conversation with Konstantin's daughter Irina, her knowledge of Mandarin proved to be minimal. ^ Since she used several different English accents over the course of the series, it could be said that she speaks more than four accents.
- #015
For Season 4, all scenes set in foreign locations were actually filmed entirely in the United Kingdom, because the team had difficulty finding locations due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
- #016
British actresses Jodie Comer and Phoebe Waller-Bridge won the lead actress Emmy on the same night, for Killing Eve (2018) and Fleabag (2016) respectively; both series were original creations by Waller-Bridge.
- #017
Phoebe Waller-Bridge had begun writing this series before her previous series, Fleabag (2016), aired.
- #018
The first scene Jodie Comer shot was the psychiatric assessment in Episode 1, in which Villanelle wears her now-iconic pink fluffy dress.
- #019
The entire series began airing in the United States before it began airing in its country of origin, the United Kingdom.
- #020
The birth date shown on the computer screen for Villanelle in Episode 5 is one day after Jodie Comer's real birthday. Jodie Comer's real birthday is March 11, 1993.
- #021
Each episode's title is taken from a line spoken by a character in that same episode.
- #022
The first chemistry read between Jodie Comer and Sandra Oh consisted of the pair performing the scene from Season 1, Episode 5 in which Eve makes a shepherd's pie for Villanelle, but a blueberry pie is used in its place at the meeting.
- #023
The final scene featuring Villanelle and Eve in the Season 4 finale was the last scene shot to date.
- #024
Some scenes were filmed in October 2017 at Reading Prison in Berkshire.
- #025
Multiple different endings were discussed for the series; one of them was for both Villanelle and Eve to die together by jumping off a cliff, in the style of 'Thelma & Louise' (1991).
- #026
Jodie Comer was once offered a role on Strictly Come Dancing (2004), but she politely declined and preferred to watch the show live in the studio with her mother and grandmother. When fans spotted Comer among the audience, they joked on social media that they feared for host Tess Daly's life, in reference to the character Villanelle.
- #027
Johnny Jewel's song 'Tell Me' features Saoirse Ronan's voice and can be heard both in the final scene of the Season 3 finale and at the wedding on the boat in the Season 4 finale.
- #028
Jodie Comer (Villanelle) and Turlough Convery (Bear) appeared together in the highly successful British series My Mad Fat Diary in 2014-2015.
- #029
Maya Rudolph was offered the role of Eve Polastri. Despite being a fan of Phoebe Waller-Bridge and the series Fleabag (2016), she turned the role down, saying 'there was no way I could move to Europe for months.'.
- #030
The character name Villanelle is believed to be derived from a combination of "Villain" — as in the phrase "She-Villain" — and "Elle," the French word for "she."
- #031
Although Villanelle is Russian and speaks with an accent, Jodie Comer is British in real life.
- #032
Both the Season 3 and Season 4 finales end at or beneath Tower Bridge.
- #033
In the first season, the Polastris' house is shown to be at the fictional address 39 Piscally Street, Ealing, London W13 2CH (or 2CK).
- #034
Francesca Gregorini directed her nephew Louis Starkey in one of the two episodes she helmed in the second season of Killing Eve (2018) — either "Smell Ya Later (2019)" or "I Hope You Like Missionary! (2019)."
- #035
In the sixth episode of Season 3, Eve and the Bear are eating Kit Kats in front of the window when a brief editing error occurs: the shot is flipped and then flipped back, so that both switch from eating with their left hands to eating with their right hands.
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