Killing Eve’s grisly Villanelle murders are all based on real assassinations
AS if Killing Eve wasn’t gruesome enough, it turns out all of assassin Villanelle’s murders do not come from the writers’ imaginations but are actually based on real kills.
Villanelle’s hit on a business mogul using perfume was inspired by the murder of Kim Jong Un’s brother.
The BBC America show follows the bizarre relationship of killer-for-hire Villanelle (Jodie Comer) and Eve (Sandra Oh), the MI5 agent tasked with catching the psychopath.
Produced and formerly written by Fleabag’s Phoebe Waller-Bridge, the show has become a worldwide smash thanks to Villanelle’s over the top style.
But now security consultant Gordon Corera has lifted the lid on the inspiration behind some of the show’s most gruesome murders.
Gordon made a “kill list” for show producers to make the world of spies and assassins seem realistic.
He BBC’s Obsessed With podcast: “I think the wildest thing I got asked to do was quite early on sitting with them and they said ‘so it’s a show about assassins, it’s about killing people’ and Phoebe and the writers said ‘we haven’t killed that many people ourselves but we don’t know that much about how to kill people’.
“I was like ‘yeah’ and they said could you help us come up with some ways of killing people and I was like ‘ok’.
“So I went away and wrote this document called the Kill List which is somewhere on my laptop. It’s basically a load of different ways to kill people, but crazy quirky ways.
“I took some things that happened 50 years ago, some that had been in the news, some that you hear about in other places and just passed that on and of course they used some of them.
He added: “And they gave that Killing Eve ‘zing’ to some of the ideas that I had and I think that’s what the writer’s are great at.”
One such quirky murder was not that far moved from reality and saw Villanelle kill a perfume mogul with a spritz of fragrance.
That scene was based on the real life murder in 2017 of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un‘s brother Kim Jong-nam.
Jong-nam was at Kuala Lumpur airport when two women – Doan Thi Huong, from Vietnam and Indonesian Siti Aisyah – allegedly rushed him and sprayed an unidentified liquid on him.
It was later revealed in the autopsy that the banned VX nerve agent was found on his face, eyes, in his blood, urine, clothing and bag.
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Other gruesome deaths in the show include stabbing a man in the eye with a hair pin, pouring saffron down a person’s throat and impaling someone with a hay fork.
But Villanelle might get her own back after the show’s producers teased she might meet a “horrible revenge”.
Speaking about the killing frenzy, show runner Suzanne Heathcote told The Hollywood Reporter: “In the writers room, we were trying to think of things that made each other gasp, or cover our faces and laugh with horror — anything that gets a visceral reaction.
“That’s the challenge of a third season: what can we do to surprise the audience, while staying true to the world?”
Killing Eve is available to stream on BBC iPlayer.
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