The actress talks all things Killing Eve

Jodie Comer’s Killing Eve character, Villanelle, has redefined what it means to be an on-screen assassin. She’s an artful psychopath as passionate about fashion and seduction as she is about murder—a natural fit for both best-dressed and Most Wanted lists.The first season of the breakout BBC America drama, which also stars Sandra Oh, saw the character take down her targets via any manner of execution technique—from good old-fashioned stabbing and shooting, to more exotic variations, involving a hairpin through an eyeball and poison in a perfume bottle.Speaking to Vanity Fair’s pop-culture podcast In the Limelight this week, Comer said that she has come to “revel in” filming Villanelle’s kills: “Kill days on set are the best days,” said the surprisingly soft-spoken British actress. Crediting show-runners Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Emerald Fennell with creating unexpected encounters, Comer said that part of the fun of these scenes is that “Villanelle really views herself as an artist in that way. It’s so thought out and so meticulously [planned].” One scene that threw Comer for a loop last season was when Villanelle infiltrated a fetish hospital and clamped a colonel’s nether region. “That was outrageous,” Comer admitted. “I remember getting the script and thinking, ‘Oh my God. Phoebe’s really playing with us here.’”Her “favorite kill,” however, was Villanelle’s Season 1 assassination of Eve’s dear friend and MI5 boss Bill (David Haig). It was the one murder, Comer said, where even she thought, “Villanelle, you shouldn’t have done that. Too far.” Comer added that she wished some of the characters introduced last season hadn’t been on Villanelle’s hit list: “By the end of Season 1, we were like, ‘Why are we killing off all the great people?’ But it creates an excitement around the show, because you just don’t know if anyone’s safe.”Bill’s death was a high point for Comer in another sense: fashion. Though Villanelle’s frothy pink Molly Goddard gown may be the assassin’s most iconic Season 1 look, Comer was partial to the Dries Van Noten brocade suit Villanelle wore into the Berlin club for that very murder. “I just felt so comfortable in it,” said Comer, who had initially been wary her character might have to hopscotch Europe in six-inch stilettos, like so many other female badasses on-screen. “She wore [the suit with], like, Doc Marten boots. And there was something about being in Berlin and [being in this cool suit] by that point in the show . . . I felt like I was really finding her.” In the second season premiere of Killing Eve, which aired last Sunday, Villanelle was introduced to another kind of comfort entirely. “There is a questionable outfit,” Comer explained. “Villanelle is extremely ill and finds herself in a hospital in Paris. She befriends a young boy who is in bed next to her. And he lends her some pajamas. Then these pajamas become heavily featured in the first two episodes. When they showed me the fabric for [the costume], they were like, ‘Yeah, so this boy is 10 years old, and you’re going to be wearing [his pajamas]. I was like, ‘Great. This is very unforgiving.’” This season, Villanelle also discovers her fashion kryptonite: Crocs. “Of all the things that could anger her or repulse her, it’s a pair of crocs,” laughed Comer.In addition, Comer discussed her twisted sympathy for Villanelle, and the one selfie request she had to politely refuse. It involved asking Comer to mock murder a fan. The actress also giddily reconstructed a recent run-in with Helen Mirren that was so lovely she “skipped back to [her] hotel room.”– Courtesy: Vanity Fair 

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