The wait is finally over as TV’s most endearing assassin has made her way to Stan.
Catch season 1 of the award-winning show Killing Eve on Stan now.
This is going to be quite tricky to avoid spoilers given I binge-watched both seasons in four days (it was clearly a very busy week), but I’ll keep myself in check for the newcomers.
BBC America’s wildly successful show Killing Eve has been garnering accolades since it aired back in 2018, and there’s a damn good reason for it.
Starring Grey’s Anatomy‘s Sandra Oh and My Mad Fat Diary‘s Jodie Comer, the plot treads familiar territory as it centres on Eve (Oh), an MI5 agent who’s been hired to track down a rogue assassin by the name of Villanelle (Comer), however, it’s the insane chemistry between the two leads that immediately sets it apart from your run-of-the-mill spy jaunt.
I have quite honestly never rooted for an objectively evil character more than Villanelle. From the very first scene, where our new favourite assassin has a (surprisingly relatable) run-in with a little girl eating ice cream, I was fixated.
I’m unsure whether this is a compliment as such, but Comer plays the dead-eyed psychopath so incredibly well that even as the viewer, you’re unnerved on behalf of everyone she encounters.
I also must discuss Comer’s ability to seamlessly switch between accents. While we discover quite early on that Villanelle was born in Russia (no spoilers, promise), throughout the entirety of season 1, we see Comer expertly navigate Russian, French, German, Spanish and British accents – and those were the only ones I remembered.
Then we have acting veteran Sandra Oh’s surprisingly scattered Eve – surprising in the sense that as TV agents typically go, she’s far removed from the standard ‘cool, calm and collected’ trope that we’ve seen dozens of times before.
On the contrary, Eve is, at times, difficult to read. While you’re not expecting her to turn around and off someone at the drop of a hat like her villainous counterpart, you do get a sense that she’s battling some inner-conflict about who she is or what she’s doing.
The casting director hands-down deserves all the awards (if they haven’t received them already, I could fact-check but I shan’t), as the supporting players are just as outstanding as Oh and Comer.
For avid British TV fans, you’ll recognise a handful of supporting cast, but perhaps not as well as Fiona Shaw – best known for her role as Aunt Petunia to all the Harry Potter enthusiasts – who delivers one hell of a performance as Eve’s blunt yet strangely humorous boss.
If the plot of the show or the actors are yet to entice you, simply watch it for what seems like one giant advert for Europe. Given Villanelle is a hired assassin who gets sent to various countries in Europe to, well, assassinate, we’re given amazing shots of villages, cities and towns that would make anyone who’s financially stable book a ticket.
But definitely watch it for everything else I mentioned, too. I’ve forced exactly three friends into watching it so far and as someone with notoriously bad taste in shows, they were suitably impressed.
That says it all, really.
Catch the entire first season of Killing Eve on Stan right now.