Yahoo News Killing Eve's Fiona Shaw Was "Very Disturbed" by the Season 3 Finale
Warning: Spoilers for Killing Eve ahead.
In Season 3 of Killing Eve, Carolyn Martens is at her most vulnerable. The icy head of MI6’s Russia desk, played masterfully by Fiona Shaw with razor-sharp deadpan humor, loses her son, gets an insolent new boss, and is pressed by her overly emotional daughter to start sharing her feelings. For Carolyn, she’s in new, sensitive territory, but for Shaw, the changes were “inevitable.”
“Where Carolyn’s strengths have done something that the audience have been enjoying, it was inevitable that we would challenge that and see her weakness,” she tells BAZAAR.com. “And there’s nothing like a personal tragedy to make a person no longer use the usual defenses or the usual powers that they have. I mean, it’s a very human thing. […] But I hope [this season] deepens the understanding of her and lets the audience get to know her more domestically and more complicatedly, that her stellar brain normally would solve everything can’t solve this.”
Carolyn seems unruffled throughout the season’s eight episodes, but she deals with her grief in her own way: by investigating the death of her son, Kenny Stowton (Sean Delaney). In the first episode of Season 3, Kenny plunges to his death from the roof of his office building, which sparks conspiracy theories about his possible murder. He was investigating The Twelve, the assassination organization that employs killer Villanelle (Jodie Comer) and her handler, Konstantin (Kim Bodnia), and discovered that someone was stealing money from the organization—was he killed by the secret thief?
In the finale, Carolyn holds a loaded gun to both Konstantin, who was the one stealing the money, and her new boss, Paul Bradwell, who turns out to be one of The Twelve. Konstantin was present when Kenny died, but with Carolyn’s weapon to his head, he explains that he was warning Kenny to stay out of The Twelve’s business to protect his safety. Kenny had just stepped back in fear and accidentally fell off the roof. Carolyn pulls the trigger but kills Paul instead, shocking Eve Polastri (Sandra Oh) and Villanelle—and viewers too.
“I don’t believe Carolyn ever killed anyone,” Shaw says. Sure, the MI6 agent has overseen and perhaps witnessed killings as part of her job, but the actress thought it would be “a long time” before we’d see her character take a life. “I was very disturbed by it, because I really didn’t think of Carolyn as a killer. I hope the audience didn’t either.”
The turn leaves us with questions for Season 4, which is slated to begin production in the summer, though it’s unclear if the schedule will change as the world remains on pause due to the coronavirus pandemic. But Shaw has a big wish for the next chapter of Killing Eve: more scenes between Carolyn and Villannelle. Amid lockdown in Islington, London—where she’s catching up on reading and growing vegetables—Shaw breaks down Carolyn’s complicated journey.
When you first found out about Kenny’s death in the script, what was your first reaction? Was it something the writers brought up to you first before you saw it on the page?
Yeah. Someone broke it to me, and then they had to break it to Kenny, which I think was a much harder thing to do, because we all adored Sean. Again, I’m not sure if it’s useful to go behind the Punch and Judy Show, and look at all the puppets, but it was a very, very … somebody very important had to go in Season 3. And Sean had enjoyed very much his seasons, but I think the killing of him from Carolyn’s point of view was catastrophic, because there was a hint of her protection of him in last season where Konstantin had said, “You don’t seem to show much.” And she said, “No, I’m very careful.” And I think that she was careful about how she appeared to love Kenny, lest somebody … I always thought he’d get kidnapped. That’s what I thought, I bet Kenny would get kidnapped. But it was worse than that. Much worse.
Did it frustrate you to see Carolyn be so cold? Especially when her very well-meaning daughter, Geraldine, was encouraging her to open up?
No! I love Carolyn. [Laughs.]
Me too.
Her daughter is very annoying. I mean, what is being explored there, is there are two types of people in the world, and they’re extreme versions, and hopefully most of us land in the middle of where our intellect and our feelings are somewhere in that consort. But in this series, you have a very, very intellectual mother who has perhaps relied on her intellect more than her feeling, because you can’t be full of feeling if you’re running something as ruthless and as dangerous as the Russian desk of MI6. But her daughter is understandably in profound reaction to the mother and is full of all these feelings. So she has gone the way of lack of logic. And I think just as types of people, they couldn’t be further apart, but I very much enjoy playing the scenes with Gemma [Whelan], and she very much enjoyed it.
We talked a lot about mothers and daughters. It’s two different instruments in the family. They really are chalk and cheese, and they really are a cello and a drum. I mean, they’re completely different creatures. And it is interesting about families, isn’t it? That you can give birth to, or be under the same roof as someone, who is so different, but there are reasons for that. I mean, definitely the daughter has allowed her feelings to override her intellect, because she probably has found her mother rather cold and maybe the mother was cold. You know, they all said Carolyn was the perfect mother, on the contrary, she obviously says herself that she doesn’t think she was very good at domestic life.
I absolutely lost it when they’re exchanging notes, and then Carolyn opened a blank page and said, "Dear Geraldine, I think it’s about time you left."
[Laughs.] What I like about it, I mean, I’m not there to defend Carolyn, I play her and I enjoy it very much, but she’s very honest.
Yeah, very shoot from the hip.
She thought it was, she says she’s incapable of dishonesty. In that regard, I mean, I’m sure she’s full of dishonesty when she has to pretend to be somebody in the spy world, but she’s very honest, and it gives her a charity of intellect to see the future. Because she’s really clear about what she thinks and feels, and sees the hopelessness of their situation.
How do you think her relationship with her daughter is different or maybe similar to her relationship with Kenny?
I mean, that’s for you, the viewer, to enjoy. I don’t think I need to make decisions about it. I play the part, but obviously, Kenny had the same gifts, whether given by first nature or encouragement, he has the same gifts as the mother. Both Kenny and Carolyn now are slightly mathematical. […] I’ve always thought that Carolyn and Kenny lived very happy together, because they probably never, hardly ever spoke. And that works fine. You know, they came inside in the evening, went to their own desks, and that’s what suited them—not speaking and certainly not discussing their emotions.
Everything came to a head in this finale when Carolyn holds Konstantin and Paul at gunpoint. It’s a very intense scene. What was it like filming that?
The last scene took days to shoot. Literally days. I thought we’d never get out of it. And I felt as uncomfortable as I think Carolyn would have, because I don’t think what happens after both of the series of Carolyn’s intellect fails her; her loyalties fail her. Paul with Kenny, not in any way on her side. And you know, the flip side of being calm is rage, isn’t it? And she’s not very good with rage, and she normally tries not to have it, but when it’s personal and it’s her son, I think she does. She goes to a territory she has never gone to before.
And then after the kill, you see her bringing in the personal side of talking about how it was justice for her son or saying that she felt responsible for his death.
Well, she was. I mean, she is responsible for his death, because inadvertently by being in those jobs, you are putting your family in some sort of danger. And I think she thought, as I said in the previous season, I think she thought she had that under control, that by playing down Kenny, nobody would be that interested in him.
I think that we were very well served this year by a very good playwright who really understood the sort of structure of things. You do need to make quantum leaps in the series. If you can't, it would become just a sitcom, if every day was another day at the office with Carolyn.
Exactly.
And really good drama means that one thing makes something else happen. What’s interesting now is what happens to Carolyn having broken the law of the land, and the law really doesn’t work, and the law of taking justice into your own hands. So who is she now? And what we showed last season is that Eve, for all of her virtue and her innocence, is no longer innocent. And I think now, Carolyn is no longer innocent. I mean, Carolyn may never be innocent. For all we know, Carolyn is the head of The Twelve. You don’t know that yet, but in terms of just the beats as we go along that she has never done anything like this.
Speaking of Eve, how did you and Sandra Oh develop your dynamic this season, considering where Eve and Carolyn are now with their intertwined, but still conflicting, personal lives and jobs?
I am very sad that they don’t get on, because I adore Sandra and I feel that our first scenes together were the thing that molded Carolyn and I loved being this guide to this younger, but very, very astute protégé that she had found. And the writing very quickly made them at odds with each other. And I’m very sad about that. I remain sad. But I as the, I don’t know, as the maker of Carolyn, I feel that I would wish that they were doing more together, and they seem to be, but then, however, it would seem that Eve has thrown herself off what was a very good half of gifts, and by this wild card of Villanelle. She’s impossible now to really get her to concentrate on the things that might forward her, not just her career, but her gift in this area of sleuthing. So I think it’s really sad. I wish I had more to do with Sandra.
What did you make of the kind of job interview between Villanelle and Carolyn in this episode?
Oh! Well, we’ve been waiting for months. I adore Jodie and we’ve all, obviously, done more time probably on red carpets and in makeup trailers than we have on the set together. So we keep on hoping and sending each other texts going, “Maybe we’ll have a scene together.” And finally we did. It’s very strange how that plot, how Carolyn is prepared to deal with Villanelle. But I have such a warm spot for Villanelle, because I think Carolyn has some of the same gifts as Villanelle. She’s very good at her job. She doesn’t have huge amounts of feeling about certain things, is not sentimental, and loves clothes. I mean, they have a lot in common. But I also adore Jodie, so we were waiting for ages to shoot the scene, and we got so over-excited about it. And then we were at the top of the Albert Hall finally doing our scene, which actually was rather short and rather simple.
It was short and sweet.
Yeah, we did look forward to it. I mean, to act with Jodie is a wonderful thing, because she’s like a Rolls-Royce, or a Harley-Davidson. When the camera is on her, you can see her accelerating and accelerating into such focus and such imaginative totality that her eyes can burn you. They’re quite amazing. She’s a lovely actress to be with, and she’s so responsive to what’s going on. So I very much enjoyed it. I hope we have more.
What are your hopes for Season 4?
My hope is that Villanelle and Carolyn have more to do with each other. I mean, surely the plot will come round, but they will join each other sometime. And one of them will become good, or one of them will become bad. I mean, it’s a polarized system, but I don’t think any of the structural things are really what Killing Eve is about. It’s about characters. And I think all good journeys are about characters rather than about themes or virtue. It’s about the interaction of big characters, and these characters are big and have a lot of depth and variation to them all triggered by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who was able to never let the character settle on one type of person for a minute. I think why they’ve lasted and will go on lasting—you could put them into any context and you’d be fascinated to see how they would respond with each other or to other people. And I can’t wait for more. I just can’t. I’m very excited by it.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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