Can Anyone Truly Change? Eve and Villanelle Wrestle With That Question in The Fourth and Final Season of KILLING EVE

By BILL HARRIS Special to The Lede Early in the fourth and final season of KILLING EVE, lead characters Villanelle and Eve come face-to-face. As loyal viewers are well aware, they have a complicated past, and things didn’t end well at the end of the third season. So this encounter is a momentous event. They eye each other warily. “If you’d really changed, you wouldn’t have come here,” Eve, played by Sandra Oh, says to Villanelle, played by Jodie Comer. “If you’d really changed, you wouldn’t have let me,” Villanelle replies to Eve. Even after everything that has occurred over three seasons of KILLING EVE, Villanelle and Eve are still tied to each other. It’s an abstract, almost subliminal connection as Season 4 begins, Sunday, Feb. 27 on CTV Drama Channel and Crave. But it’s still there, as much as Eve, in particular, would like to deny it. During a virtual panel interview to set up Season 4, Oh was asked if she believes anyone can truly change. “I think in personality they stay the same, but I do believe people can change,” Oh said. “If they can’t, I just think all is lost.” When someone chuckled at the apparent doom and gloom of that observation, Oh doubled down. “I’m not joking,” Oh said. “I feel like all is lost. It’s like, we all have been deeply affected by the pandemic, and if we don’t change … there are different levels of change, you know what I mean? And what I realize is that for real, true change to happen, it’s so personal, and you have to work really, really hard on it. On other levels of changing behaviour, you’re changed by an event, and it’s then your job to put that change into practice. You can do that. You can then start being much more aware of your own unconscious biases. So you can change. But for me, from personal experience, I just know that it is extremely slow and challenging.” And how does that apply specifically to the final season of KILLING EVE? “I think the innate kind of personalities for (Eve and Villanelle) – their wit, or their danger, or their humour – have not really changed,” Oh said. “But I think that their moral compass has slightly changed.” Well … that certainly can be categorized as “T.B.D.” as Season 4 progresses. Comer – who won an EMMY® AWARD in 2019 for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series, and has been nominated twice overall in that category – and Oh – who has been nominated three times in the same category – were both asked to reflect upon their KILLING EVE journey. “Well, I’m not sure what (Villanelle) represents, but I will definitely say that she has changed my life in many ways, like, in a very obvious way in the work that I’m now able to do,” Comer said. “But I think I really had to shed a skin with her. I think I was extremely self-conscious coming into this process, and there was something about playing her where I had to get rid of that, and I had to dare, and I had to be a little fearless, and that has definitely filtered through my own life, which I’m very grateful for. (Villanelle) has some very bad qualities, but there’s a lot about her that I love to celebrate, and that kind of lack of caring what people think, and just her being herself, is something that I really kind of took with me, for sure.” Oh added, “I was very much actively trying to grow Eve as a character, and I think in that process I had to grow as a person as well. Sometimes that doesn’t happen in the most comfortable ways. It doesn’t come in comfortable ways for Eve, so I don’t think it necessarily happened in comfortable ways for me. But when you’ve been around enough, you just know those rare times that you’ve been able to be a part of the creation, and as an actor it’s a very special place to be.” billharristv@gmail.com @billharris_tv