Sandra Oh Reveals Alternate ‘Killing Eve’ Ending That Almost Happened

We’re still not over the disastrous Killing Eve finale, and its stars apparently aren’t over talking about it themselves. Sandra Oh recently revealed the ending was almost something entirely different — albeit not much better.

Spoilers ahead…

As most frustrated fans undoubtedly know by now, the beloved series ended with Villanelle (Jodie Comer) and Eve (Oh) finally acknowledging their feelings for one another before the former was brutally murdered by a sniper shot in the final moments of the show. It was a brutal blow when it seemed like television finally had a reckoning in recent years over the “bury your gays” trope, especially considering the two end up together and very much alive in the source material.

But in recent conversation withDeadline, Oh admitted that she had originally suggested Eve was the one who should die.

“When I was talking to Laura Neal, our head writer — that was at the beginning of 2020 — and we were chatting about how we were going to end this,” she said. “I was like, ‘You should kill my character.’ I thought that would be the strongest and most interesting ending.”

She felt it was appropriate due to Eve going “into kind of like a nihilistic place” by the end of season three, and to “continue that line and…go straight into it” would have been an emotionally satisfying conclusion to her story in Oh’s eyes.

Killing Eve, in addition to fulfilling the premise of the title, might have been slightly more interesting than killing Villanelle, although it still fails to take into consideration the perpetuation of a harmful trope and would have depended tremendously on how it actually played out.

Regardless, it was not meant to be. After the pandemic delayed shooting, Oh says the writers had more time to think it over and decided “Eve needs to live.”

“Eve is the way into this world, she’s our everywoman, so it’s kind of really super depressing if she dies,” she explained. “So we switched it around and Jodie was very much on board with that.”

It’s safe to say fans generally would have preferred a version where neither died — which also would have been the only surprising twist in a show about an agent hunting down and eventually falling for an assassin.