‘Killing Eve’: Sandra Oh Compares Reading the Pilot Script to ‘Knowing You’re Going to Fall in Love’
Sandra Oh finds herself in a game of cat-and-mouse with an assassin on Killing Eve. But how did the Grey’s Anatomy alum initially react to the script for the psychological drama? She loved it.
Sandra Oh is Eve Polastri on ‘Killing Eve’
Oh plays intelligence operative Eve Polastri on Killing Eve. When fans first met her in season 1 — the series debuted in April 2018 — Polastri was introduced as a smart, albeit slightly hungover, agent. In a meeting with her superiors, she guessed the mysterious assassin had to be a woman. Polastri was right. The assassin was later identified as Villanelle (Jodie Comer).
As Oh’s character followed Villanelle’s every move and became closer and closer to catching her, her life took a turn for the worse. Her once happy marriage to Niko (Owen McDonnell) imploded and people around her died because of Villanelle.
Three seasons later Polastri and Villanelle’s complicated relationship continues. Meanwhile, Killing Eve’s received numerous awards including a Golden Globe for Oh and an Emmy for Comer.
Sandra Oh loved ‘Killing Eve’ from the start
So what was Oh’s initial reaction to the Killing Eve pilot? She didn’t need convincing because the words Fleabag’s Phoebe Waller-Bridge had written sold her on the idea of the spy show.
“Phoebe Waller-Bridge has such a unique and singular voice. It was right there on the page. That experience of first getting that first pilot script, I’m always going to be looking for that feeling now forward,” Oh told Vanity Fair in an August 2021 YouTube video.
“It was being able to read her voice so clearly on that page. It’s like a sense of knowing that you’re going to fall in love. It’s like a sense of somehow you know that you get the person,” she explained. “‘I understand what you’re trying to say and I am the right one for you. I’m going to be able to get you what you want because there’s something extremely interesting here and it’s just like I get it.’ And I think that was very much the feeling I was operating on when I decided to do Killing Eve.”
So it didn’t take any convincing to get Oh to sign on for the lead role.
Filming on ‘Killing Eve’ Season 4 is currently underway
It’s been a long wait for fans but new episodes of Killing Eve are on the way. After heading to the east coast to film Amanda Peet’s Netflix original series, The Chair, in which she plays the newly appointed head of a struggling college English department, Oh left the classroom to resume her role as Polastri. In the summer of 2021, she traveled across the Atlantic to begin filming the TV show’s fourth and final season in London, England.
No official release date has been announced at the time of publication but Killing Eve Season 4 is expected to premiere in 2022. But that’s not the end because there are plans for Killing Eve spinoffs.
