Do you wish Killing Eve had ended differently? According to Sandra Oh, it almost did.
In an interview with our sister site Deadline — watch the full video here — Oh addresses the BBC America thriller’s series finale, which divided fans last month with its brutally abrupt ending. In the final moments, Villanelle was killed by a sniper while Oh’s character Eve survived, but Oh reveals that “honestly, it was going to be the other way around,” meaning that Eve would die and Villanelle would live.
Oh and Season 4 lead writer Laura Neal “were chatting about how we were going to end this,” she recalls, and “I was like, ‘You should kill my character.’ I thought that would be the strongest and the most interesting” ending, and “I felt, emotionally, it was the right place of where I was at.” She notes that at the end of Season 3, “Eve was starting to get into, like, a nihilistic place, and we’re like, ‘Let’s just continue that line and go straight into it.’”
But then the pandemic shut down production, and later that year, “they came to me, and they said, ‘We can’t do it. We need to change it… Eve needs to live.’” As Oh points out, “Eve is the way into this world. She’s our everywoman. So it’s kind of really super depressing if she dies.” So “we switched it around,” Oh says, adding that her costar Jodie Comer, who played Villanelle, “was very much onboard for that.”
Many fans were not onboard with the ending, though, and neither was book author Luke Jennings, who voiced his concerns about the finale in a scathing commentary, criticizing the Killing Eve writers for “bowing to convention” and “punishing” Eve and Villanelle “for the bloody, erotically impelled chaos they have caused.” He wished Eve and Villanelle could’ve both survived: “How much more darkly satisfying, and true to Killing Eve‘s original spirit, for the couple to walk off into the sunset together?”
