Jodie Comer won Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series at the Emmy Awards for her role as Vilanelle in Killing Eve. Photo / Supplied
Jodie Comer won Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series at the Emmy Awards for her role as Vilanelle in Killing Eve. Photo / Supplied
What TV's most entertaining murder show learned from a YouTube video, a podcast, an ad and the Coen brothers.
One of the thrills of Killing Eve, which saw Jodie Comer win Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series at Monday's Emmy Awards, is that it is not simply a thriller.The show careens between genres, at once an office sitcom, a police procedural and a screwball romance between the stylish assassin Villanelle (Jodie Comer) and the unlikely spy Eve Polastri (Sandra Oh). And although the source materials for Killing Eve are nominally Luke Jennings' slick novellas, the show was built on a jumble of pop culture inputs.
Below, the show's creator, Phoebe Waller-Bridge; Comer; and director Harry Bradbeer discuss some of the influences on their mood-swinging show, including a YouTube video, a podcast and a viral ad.
An infamous jailhouse interview
When Waller-Bridge was tapped to spin Jennings' books into a TV show, "I fell into a Google hole around female assassins," she said during a conversation in London earlier this year. She crawled out with a 2012 jailhouse interview on YouTube with convicted Arizona killer Angela Simpson.
Simpson — who appears in a black-and-white-striped jail uniform, a World Star Hip-Hop logo hanging over her image — is a far cry from Villanelle's glamorous psycho. But as she watched Simpson's story of how she locked a man in her basement, tortured and killed him, Waller-Bridge spied "gold dust."
Killing Eve creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge found inspiration for Vilanelle in the YouTube video of convicted killer Angela Simpson. Photo / YouTube
Waller-Bridge had been trying to access the inner workings of Villanelle's mind, and she found a key in Simpson. When Simpson boasts about the murder, "she sounds more like a psycho than anyone has ever sounded," Waller-Bridge said.
But when Simpson thinks the camera is off, she erupts exuberantly at her performance. She beams at the camera crew and says: "That's going to be wicked! Make it look good, please!" All of a sudden, as Waller-Bridge put it, "she sounds so girlie." The look of the affectless psychopath is just one costume Simpson assumes, and she becomes giddy with pride when she wears it well.
The My Favourite Murder podcast
Eve Polastri is charming partly because of her less-than-professional interest in murder, which helps peel away the self-serious trappings of typical crime dramas and draw her closer to the voyeuristic audience. In early scripts, Eve was a true-crime nut, and Waller-Bridge enlisted a friend obsessed with the genre to explain its appeal.
Eve Polastri (played by Sandra Oh) is a true-crime nut Photo / Supplied
The friend introduced her to the podcast My Favourite Murder, in which the comedians Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark gush over the Wikipedia pages of odd and horrifying crimes. Then, Waller-Bridge recorded her friend as she explained the psychological and physical effects of listening.
"'I like feeling that vacuous emptiness in my soul when I realise there are people out there who can do this,'" Waller-Bridge recalled her friend saying. "'It puts me in a victim position, and it makes me feel alive.'" Later, Waller-Bridge decided that Eve's murder fascination should be sparked just as Villanelle enters her life, and should grow only stronger as she learns of her crimes.
The Kenzo World ad
Villanelle is a psychopath with great emotional range, which is not to say that her facial expressions convey normal human reactions — they seem to originate from a different place than everybody else's. One reference point was Spike Jonze's 2016 ad for Kenzo World perfume, which Waller-Bridge and Bradbeer sent to Comer as a clue to Villanelle.
In the ad, actress and ballerina Margaret Qualley is sitting complacently at a fancy dinner when she is taken over by some kind of alien force, her body and face shifting and spasming out of control. This could be framed as frightening, but instead it is played as invigorating — as a kind of freedom from societal expectations. Comer was drawn to "the unpredictability" of Qualley but also to her "playfulness and the enthusiasm," she said. "At the flip of a switch, she can be something completely different."
No country for old men
Harry Bradbeer, who directed the first two episodes of the first season, knew that "the camera should have a special relationship with Villanelle," he said. Though there is a remoteness to Villanelle's personality, the camera is often close on her face, immersing the audience in her emotions and hinging on her perspective. As Bradbeer put it, "The camera studies her while she studies the world." It's as if "the audience is in the driver's seat of the character's mind."
Javier Bardem in No Country For Old Men. Photo / Supplied
In shooting Villanelle, Bradbeer studied the cinematographer Roger Deakins' work with the Coen brothers, who are also known for their blend of comedy and terror. In No Country for Old Men, we get an oddly intimate glimpse at the most inhuman of figures, Javier Bardem's ghastly hit man, Anton Chigurh. Like Villanelle, Chigurh is most chilling in those moments when he seems to be acting almost normal. "The more happy and innocent and playful and naughty Villanelle seems," Bradbeer explained, "the more dangerous she becomes."
