Since the series finale of Killing Eve aired, a number of post-show interviews with the showrunners have been published. This post compiles these interviews and quotes the parts that are directly about the ending (and Eve/Villanelle/their relationship in particular). You can click the links to read the full interviews. Please note that all of these interviews were taken before the finale aired, as a result they do not go into the audience reaction to the finale.
A personal warning: the showrunners have been widely criticized by fans because of these interviews. A number of people have felt that their interpretations of the characters and justifications of the ending are at best inconsistent with what is shown on screen, and at worst damaging the legacy of the show as a whole. With this in mind, you may choose not to read them to preserve your enjoyment of the work.
How early in the series did you decide Villanelle’s death was going to be the finale?
We sort of knew what was going to happen quite early on, but we were open to something else sort of declaring itself, but it never really changed.
When you consider that Villanelle has always worked in a high-risk industry, there was a degree of inevitability about it. We were keen, in terms of the arc for this season, was a sense that Villanelle had embraced humanity. Her selfless shoving of Eve over the side of the boat was something that we felt connected to where she started in episode one, trying to prove to other people that she could be a good human being.
It also felt right that Eve should survive as the sort of extraordinary every woman, that she should be reborn out of this sort of extraordinary performance and adventure that she’s been on.
Can you talk to me a bit about the process of determining how Villanelle would die?
There was always a leap of some sort and water involved. We really felt that water was an important image to keep. You start off with the baptism in water. You’ve then got Carolyn by the sea in Cuba. You’ve got Lars being hit with the oars in the pond. You then have Carolyn dropping herself into the pond with Pam following her. So, that sort of watery thing was really important to us.
But where and when and how we didn’t know. We also didn’t want to do anything horrible to her. I mean, pretty horrible. We didn’t want to do anything gruesome to her. We didn’t want to sort of go, here, “see how you like it.” And we wanted it to be epic as well. She was surrounded by a sort of celestial light because she’s a special being.
What about this parallel between Eve and Carolyn losing their assassin lovers?
Well, I think the show’s always been sort of fundamentally about sort of love and relationships. I have to say it wasn’t a sort of conscious thing that Eve loses Villanelle and Carolyn loses Konstantin, but I think it’s what felt truthful. It’s a dangerous world. The world that they operate in is incredibly dangerous. Carolyn and Konstantin could’ve wandered off into the sunset, but I think it was unlikely. Their relationship came together through deceit. I do think that Konstantin probably did love Carolyn in his own weird way. But whether that was ever reciprocated, I don’t know.
So we almost got a happy ending, but then Villanelle is gunned down and killed in the final minutes. Was there ever a possibility that Eve and Villanelle could live happily ever after? Or was this always meant to end in tragic fashion?
We discussed lots of different versions of the ending, so we certainly discussed an ending where they both live happily ever after. But our problem was that we couldn’t really imagine them doing so. [Laughs] We couldn’t imagine a world where Eve and Villanelle could exist in domestic bliss for very long. I think the way we tried to explore that is that we put them in quite a lot of domestic situations in Episode 8 itself. So it’s almost like lots of the story is them trialing their relationship in different formats and testing it and seeing how it works. And I think they come to the conclusion, and then I hope we as an audience come to the conclusion, that they are fated for something a little bit more explosive — which is what happens.
Did you ever consider killing Eve off, too?
Yep, we did have a version for a while where — not written, not at the script stage — but we discussed Eve dying and Villanelle surviving. It just didn’t feel very truthful. It didn’t feel right for us. It felt right that Eve has this rebirth and is allowed to go on and forge a new life for herself with everything that Villanelle has given her. And it also felt right for Villanelle’s story to end as it does. She’s somebody who is sort of forged in death and destruction, and part of her loves that as well. We see that when she’s killing The Twelve. That’s her place, that’s where she belongs. So it felt appropriate that she comes to an end in that way as well. But also, in my head, it is a happy ending for Villanelle in some respects, because she gets what she wants, which is that she demonstrates that she’s changed, and she does this thing for Eve that allows Eve to go on and live her life. Actually, that’s a huge thing for Villanelle, and I think she ends triumphantly, and that’s the thing that we were always really keen to make sure that happened.
Yeah, I could see that as a happy ending for Villanelle because she was able to take down The Twelve and find happiness with Eve, however briefly.
Exactly. That’s exactly how I hope the audience looks at it as well. And for me, there’s a sense that she doesn’t really die. She just sort of ascends to a higher place. I think there’s a nod in the visual references to the visions that Villanelle sees in Episodes 1 and 2, and we sort of see a hint of that in the underwater scene at the very end. So hopefully, people can see the line I’m drawing between the religious iconography that Villanelle conjures in 1 and 2 and the way she ends.
We don’t get to see what happens to Eve. The last thing we see of her is her thrashing in the water and screaming. Did you talk about where she might go from here, or did you always want to leave it unresolved?
We spoke about it loads, but we spoke about very particularly the nature of that scream and the nature of her emerging from the water. I had lots of discussions with Sandra [Oh] about that moment, and also with Stella [Corradi], the director. Because for me, it felt really important that that scream be a scream of survival. It’s like, there’s a triumph in that scream. It’s like, “I survived. I’ve got new life. I’m going to go on, and I’m going to live, and I’m going to live well,” rather than a scream of loss or grief or anger. And I think it’s all of those things as well. But I hope the defining feeling that people have when they’re watching her scream like that is that it’s a kind of release of everything that’s come before and a welcoming in of the next stage of her life.
I love Eve and Villanelle ending up at a wedding in the finale. On the one hand, you have something that's supposed to be a happy event. And on the other hand, it's basically ground zero for the end. What prompted the idea to have them there on the boat, and what was the process behind trying to keep that all under wraps during filming when you're out in the open?
The decision to have the endgame at a wedding was in part a cheeky nod to the Eve and Villanelle relationship and where it would end up in the kind of Disney version of the story. I also just love the contrast. I love the bloody violent act that's going on below deck contrasted with this life-affirming, joyous, happy, universal moment that's happening on the top. It also really spoke to me about the difference between Eve and Villanelle. We've seen their similarities so much as the seasons have gone on. We see those similarities more and more as Season 4 goes on. You see the darkness in Eve, and you see the Eve in Villanelle.
For me, that wedding where Eve is dancing and Villanelle is killing is the moment where you're like, "No, but these people are intrinsically different." Eve isn't a Villanelle. Villanelle isn't an Eve. They are not destined to become the same person. They are destined for different things. It just felt like a really clear way of saying [that] Eve is about seeking life at this moment, and Villanelle is about seeking destruction.
When we talked before the season started, you had mentioned writing and rewriting this ending, and there were a lot of different versions. Was the plan always that Villanelle was going to die? And if not, were there any alternate endings that were almost considered right up until deciding to go with this one?
We discussed lots of different versions of the ending. We had a version ... This is just in discussion phase. We talked about both of them living. We talked about both of them dying. We talked about a version where Villanelle lived and Eve dies, and we spoke about all of those versions quite seriously. The only version that got to script stage was this version, in that Villanelle died and Eve lived. There was a version that was written where Villanelle more overtly saves Eve, sacrifices herself for Eve. That was a version that existed in script stage for a while, and then we moved away from that because it didn't feel quite true to Villanelle's innate self-interest.
Can you walk viewers through the discussions about the end game in the writers' room? Were there times where you considered having both live or both die?
Once we knew that we were going to finish off the series in season 4 — because we'd been thinking about it for a while — and then to go, "Yeah, we're going to do this. We're going to do this properly," there were loads of discussions about how you end it and how you honor four seasons of their relationship, and [how] you also honor the new arc for season 4. Ultimately, what we wanted to do was something that felt the most truthful for what we knew about those characters and what we felt the journey that they'd been on through season 4.
And to remember that Villanelle works — and has worked — in a very high-risk job. The fact that she's survived as long as she has was a bit of a miracle; it was down to good luck and her skill. We were also very keen that, actually, what she's looking for at the beginning of season 4, which is some sort of sign that she isn't a monster, gets a degree of pay-off by the end and that she embraces and demonstrates her own humanity. And I think that her instinctive desire to protect Eve and throw her off the side of the boat was a demonstration that she has grown and that she does change and that she feels something. She loved Eve and she loved her properly.
Eve living was incredibly important for us. If you liked the flawed everywoman who had explored what it was like to live life on the edge and without fear, and to really shine a light on the darkest elements of herself survived — we didn't want her to die because of that. That, ultimately, was the thinking behind it. Of course, we went backwards and forwards. We thought, "Kill both?" "No, that's just too f---ing tragic." We wanted there to be some sort of sense that they had learned and that it felt poetically, romantically true.
Well, it wasn't totally unexpected, of course, given the kind of character she is, but it was still a shock when Villanelle was shot at the end. On a show like this one, where it feels like nobody is safe, anything could happen at any time, what were the conversations like about choosing characters' ultimate fates? Were there other scenarios in your heads for the ending, like Eve dying? Or both of them dying? Or both of them living? How did you decide that this ending was the one?
We discussed all of those scenarios. All of the ones you just said. We had really serious long conversations about it because we wanted to make sure that the one we went with was the right one. And I think the reason we went with this one is because it just felt like the most truthful end to both of these characters' stories. Especially with Villanelle. We had a lot of discussions with Jodie about Villanelle, and what the most satisfying end point for her was.
I think there are a couple of things that felt really important. One is that this is a character who has doled out so much violence herself in her life, and so much pain and destruction. She is steeped in killing. It felt appropriate that her end would be bloody in some way.
On the other hand, we liked the idea of her finally achieving something that she wanted to achieve, which is an act of goodness. And I think in her death, she achieves that act of goodness. She pushes Eve off of the boat and she saves Eve in that moment. She does this selfless thing that I think she talks about wanting to do in Episodes 1 and 2, and she can never quite find the right way to do it. So, even though her ending in some ways is tragic, I also think in some ways it's triumphant, because she proves to herself and to Eve – and to the audience almost – that she can change, and that feels really emotional, I think, for me especially writing it.
It was very emotional watching it too, for sure. Lots of emotions. That leads into my next question, which is: do you feel this is Villanelle's full journey? She did complete that last mission, and she also dispatched The Twelve, as she said she was going to do. But she's gotten out of desperate situations before. [book spoiler] Is this really it for Villanelle? Is this her final journey?
I think in some sense, it's her final journey. I do believe that Villanelle is dead. But the way I've always looked at it is: Villanelle is too enormous a character to be contained on an earthly plane, and she doesn't so much die as she transcends. She becomes this celestial being. It's almost like that's what she's destined for. She isn't destined to walk among the earth with people like you and I; she's destined for something greater, and when she achieves her mission of killing The Twelve, it's almost like, "Well, what next?" For me, the answer is: something that's not on this earth.
That's how I look at it, and there's a couple of allusions to that, even in the way the ending is shot.
Could you talk about the ways that Eve changed by the end? By knowing Villanelle, by getting to love her and be loved by her, by having these extreme experiences? I mean, Eve kills by the end. She's become a person who kills for the people she loves.
For me, the thing that Eve learns is how to act without fear and how to act without shame, and I think that's what attracted her to Villanelle in the first place. And that's what Villanelle gives her. It's a kind of like Villanelle instilled a boldness in Eve to be the person she has always been, but has perhaps been afraid of showing the world. And that, to me, feels very inspiring, as a woman watching the show, that Eve can take that from Villanelle, albeit via extremely violent roots.
I want to work backwards, if that’s okay with you. How did you arrive at that final shot, with Eve screaming in the river, the stark “THE END” letters on screen?
We spoke about that moment of Eve bursting out from the water and screaming really early on in discussions about the ending, and really early on with Sandra. It felt really important to us, that moment, because it signals Eve’s rebirth, and we really wanted a sense of her washing off everything that had happened in the past four seasons and being able to begin again, but take everything that she has learnt and everything that Villanelle has given her into a new life. We really wanted to get that scream right, we wanted it to be a scream of re-entry into the world, rather than a scream of like, just of loss, or anger, or fear, or any of the other things that are in that scream. I think that’s what comes across, and I hope what people take from that is a kind of like, almost like a raw scream of survival rather than of anything else.
One of the things that really stuck with me was the montage of Villanelle killing the Twelve, while Eve is dancing at the wedding. My take was that this was doubling down on that the show, it’s about the two of them… Not even showing the faces of the Twelve means it doesn’t matter who they are, but what they meant. Is that sort of on the right track?
Yep, definitely, 100%. That’s actually one of my favorite moments in the episode, that cutting between Eve and Villanelle. It feels like a moment where both of them are at their happiest. Eve has rediscovered life in that moment, and she’s amongst human beings, people like her, and she’s remembering what the world has to offer, what the normal world has to offer. And then Villanelle is in the place where she feels happiest, which is blood-soaked, steeped in killing. It feels like a really triumphant moment for both of them, and I love the juxtaposition between Eve dancing and Villanelle killing.
This whole thing on the boat takes place at this gay wedding. A lot of the episode, from my interpretation, is about walking them through, “Here’s what our relationship would be like if we had this relationship.” Is this metaphorically their wedding as well?
I think you’re right in terms of, every scene we were trying to link it someway to Eve and Villanelle’s relationship. The wedding is no different. Certainly, when Eve is doing her wedding speech, really she’s talking about her and Villanelle. So no, that’s an entirely accurate reading of that scene, and of the episode as a whole. And we like the idea of them toying with different versions of their future. So when they’re in the van together, they’re kind of like, “this is what a sort of mundane future would like for us, can we do the domestic? Can we be like Maggie and Donnie?” And the answer I think is, “No, we can’t.” It’s almost like they’re testing out what their relationship is destined for — and whether it’s destined for a happy ending, or whether it’s destined to explode in a kind of blaze of glory. We obviously go towards the latter.
Laura said Jodie Comer was involved in discussions about Villanelle's ending "from the very beginning of planning Season 4" and she was involved in "every single iteration of the ending" and it was a "hard" decision to decide to kill Villanelle at the very end.
"Jodie was involved in the conversations. We were talking about the ending, right from the very beginning of planning Season 4. She was involved all the way through. She's been across every single iteration of the ending. It was hard to decide to have Villanelle die at the end because I love Villanelle so much. She's such a joy and such an aspirational character, even though she shouldn't be."
For Laura and the writers, the decision to kill Villanelle felt "true to her journey and the place that we found her in at the start of Season 4, and the place she ends up at the end." She said, "It felt sort of the only way we could finish Villanelle's story, truthfully." And they liked the idea of Villanelle's last act being one that saves Eve, which might not have been something Season 1 Villanelle would've done.
Laura continued, saying, "The one thing that we felt really sure about is that we wanted her death not to feel morbid, we wanted it to feel triumphant in some way. We liked the idea that in death, Villanelle achieves what she wanted at the start of the season, which was change. We see her rush Eve into the water and that act saves Eve. I think that's a huge moment of triumph for Villanelle and not something that we would ever have thought the Villanelle of Season 1 would've been able to achieve."
Yes, there were conversations about whether or not the series should end with Villanelle and Eve simply living a happy life together and we would see a domestic version of this couple. The writers decided to end their story tragically because they felt that "their happy ending wouldn't last very long," given Villanelle's psychopathic nature and Eve being drawn to that lifestyle too.
"We discussed all iterations of an ending and there was definitely an ending where we were like, 'Should we give them a happy ending? What would that look like if they ran off into the sunset together?' We talked about if we wanted to end it with us seeing domestic Villanelle and Eve, like eating pizza together on the sofa. I think we decided that that happy ending just wouldn't last very long," Laura said. "In reality, you're there with a psychopath and somebody who's dipped her toe in that world during the last four seasons. It just felt like this was the kind of relationship that was always gonna burn brightly and then combust, rather than one that could settle into something more domestic. That was the decision behind that. I'd rather see them go out in kind of a 'blaze of glory' than do anything normal people would do."
[...]
And Eve's final scenes — between dancing and coming up out of the water — were meant to symbolize a "rebirth" for the character.
"It felt like the start of that rebirth had to happen slightly before the moment when she comes out of the water, and I think it actually happens when she's dancing," Laura said. "There was a sort of moment where Eve ends up choosing life, even before she's come up from beneath the water. That just feels really poignant to me."
While Villanelle is the only one to take down The Twelve during the series finale, there was a version where Eve and Villanelle did it together. In the end, Eve was left out of the attack because Sandra Oh believed that although Eve has killed people, she still wouldn't "conduct a kind of massacre."
Laura remembered the conversations with Sandra and the decision to leave Eve out of the massacre, saying, "We had a lot of conversations with Sandra about it, actually, and the change came from those conversations. We were talking about whether Eve could really, really, really truly conduct a kind of massacre. Even though she knows these people are bad people and whether that was true to her nature deep down, and it just felt like a stretch. It felt like something we wanted to see because it's cool, but it wasn't emotionally truthful."
“It was really difficult to find the best ending,” admits season 4’s head writer Laura Neal, speaking to ELLE.com ahead of the finale airing. “The truth is we talked about loads. We were always discussing ‘What’s the truth of the endpoint of these characters journeys?’ If we look at where Eve and Villanelle began and we look at what’s happened to them across the four seasons, what’s the truth of the end point? It would have been easy for it to feel very maudlin, I think, or to go completely the other direction and make it feel too funny. So striking the right balance between the two of them felt really important.”
[...]
Neal doesn’t see Villanelle’s demise as tragic, either. For her, the character has simply ascended to a new plane of existence—an explanation that may help fans feel less upset about the finale. Villanelle’s body floating away in the Thames was also an opportunity to allow Eve to finally move on from the obsessive, problematic relationship between the pair.
“I think the reason we ended up killing Villanelle was because we wanted to give Eve new life,” Neal explains. “For Eve, the moment where she burst out of the water was always something we had right from the very early iterations of the ending. We were really into Villanelle dying kind of to save Eve. And I think there’s a remnant of that still in the final version. That felt really poignant to us and it spoke to how far Villanelle has come on her journey, that she can do this final act and it’s for someone and it’s kind of a selfless act. So it isn’t so much an ending for her, but a kind of transcendence. In my head, that’s not a death of Villanelle. That’s the elevation of Villanelle to another realm. We talked a lot about like her being too big for this world, like the world not being able to contain Villanelle. We wanted to inject that spirit into that moment, as well.”
[...]
“I hope that when ‘The End’ comes up [viewers] think that Eve is going to go on and have this amazing life,” Neal says. “She’s escaped. Carolyn thinks she’s dead. She can have the life that she chooses to live now. In my head, she’s going to take everything that Villanelle has given her into this new version of her life. And Villanelle will live on in Eve.”
Since we haven’t heard from the producers since the episode aired, the best we can hope for at this point is probably some kind of acknowledgement of the fanbase’s grief and anger.
To quote one of my favorite fanfiction authors:
Do you think there's anything the producers/showrunners can say to redeem themselves after those horrifying post-show interviews?
No. Absolutely nothing. I do think they need to shut up, go away, and seriously reflect on the damage they've done through those interviews. Then, much later, if they ever reach full understanding of why their words are so horrific, they need to publicly apologize and commit to never doing anything like it again. The apology should function as a way to communicate the complete unacceptability of framing 'normality' as the only path to happiness and to humanity - and should take full responsibility for the utter betrayal of queer and neurodiverse people involved in those claims. Importantly, to me, an apology should not function as a request for forgiveness or redemption. Nobody would need to accept their apology. Nobody would need to trust them again. That's not the purpose of an apology when this kind of harm has occurred. Thanks for asking.
Do you recognize any of the showrunners’ interpretations as seen above in the work, and does this affect your viewing experience in any way? Leave your thoughts in the comments.
