Sandra Oh reveals the ‘super depressing’ alternative ending to Killing Eve

Virgin Radio

5 May 2022, 13:18

Killing Eve fans were left reeling when the series finally came to an end in April. (Spoilers ahead!)

The final episode of series four was a whirlwind that nearly gave us the happily ever after between Villanelle (Jodie Comer) and Eve (Sandra Oh) we so desperately wanted.

However, it came to quite a heartbreaking (and abrupt) conclusion when Villanelle finally met her end with a sniper bullet. After discovering that Carolyn (Fiona Shaw) had ordered the hit, we were left with a scene of Eve screaming to the sky, followed by text on the screen announcing: “The End.”

But now, Eve herself, Sandra Oh, has shone some light on what the show was originally supposed to end with, and it turns out someone was always going to die, but it wasn’t always Villanelle. 

During an interview with Deadline, Sandra explained: “Honestly, it was going to be the other way around.

"When I was talking to Laura Neal, our head writer – that was at the beginning of 2020 – and we were chatting about how we were going to end this. I was like, 'You should kill my character'. I thought that would be the strongest and the most interesting ending.

"And not only that, I felt emotionally, it was the right place of where I was at, because at the end of season 3, I just felt like Eve was starting to get into kind of like a nihilistic place, and we're like, 'Let's just continue that line and let's go straight into it'.

But it turns out COVID has a lot to answer for, and the decision was made to kill off Villanelle during the pandemic when production was shut down. 

Sandra continued: “The pandemic happened, and then somewhere in the summertime, they came to me and said, 'We can't do it. We need to change it. Eve needs to live'.

"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 and Jodie was very much on board with that."

Of course, fans were also devastated that Eve and Villanelle didn’t get their fairytale ending, so when the finale aired, one user took to Twitter to remind others that the books by Luke Jennings had a very different (and happier) conclusion to their story.

The fan shared pictures of the book Killing Eve: Die For Me and wrote: "A genuinely friendly reminder that this is how the books end: them together, living their lives happily. villanelle doesn't die and gets a linguistics degree. #killingeve #villaneve".

Killing Eve is available to watch on BBC iPlayer.