Interview with Lee Morris
Lee Morris is an Executive Producer on Killing Eve.
Published: 29 May 2019
What makes it different is the deeply comedic angle - you see little glimpses of the characters that you wouldn’t normally get in a drama. The suspense is always being undercut by the comedy.
Can we discuss the fantastic response season one received when it came out?
Season one had the most amazing and unexpected response. Sid Gentle Films is a small company in London and to have a breakout hit has been an incredible surprise to us. We developed Killing Eve two or three years ago and there’s been a lot of work getting us to this point. You always try to create the best show and then you put it out there and hope people like it.
Killing Eve is an unusual show about two powerful and deeply imperfect women. Has it breathed new life into the spy genre?
There are several things that make Killing Eve different from the traditional spy genre. To begin with, the two main protagonists are women, and I don’t really think you see that anywhere else. The fact that there is a female perspective to the whole thing makes it different - we had Phoebe Waller-Bridge and now Emerald Fennell leading the writing teams. They have brought freshness and invention to the genre.
Secondly, on the face of it Killing Eve is a spy drama, so you expect moments of suspense and tension. But what makes it different is the deeply comedic angle and how you see little glimpses of characters that you wouldn’t normally get in a drama. The suspense is always being undercut by the comedy. That is probably the biggest thing that makes the show so special.
What is it like to film on location in major cities like Paris, London, Amsterdam and Rome?
Normally when you get a script in television and it says ‘Amsterdam’, the first thing you think of as a producer is, how are we going to do that or how are we going to fake it? On Killing Eve when the script arrives and it says ‘Amsterdam’, the first thing I think of is - I’m off to Amsterdam!
That’s one of the things that makes the show so special. We actually go to the places that are in the script and shoot it there. We have a policy which is to steer away from the touristy, more familiar aspects of any city. We try to find a real part of it instead. When we’re in London, we don’t really see the London Eye or the Houses of Parliament, but we see roads that couldn’t really be anywhere else, and there will be London buses.
Once we go to a foreign city we take that mentality with us, and we try to find something that is unique to that city. London isn’t an easy city to film in and it’s also very expensive. When we go abroad, we get presented with different challenges. We tend to take our core crew with us wherever we go and that helps us maintain the look and style of the show. We are then incredibly reliant on a service company in the local territory. We have been incredibly fortunate and skilful in choosing some fantastic partners in the cities that we’ve shot sequences in.
How is it working with Sandra and Jodie?
Sandra and Jodie are the two people who have created a fantastic hit show for us. They’re both superb actors who bring different things to the roles that they’re playing. Apart from being extremely witty and funny, Sandra is also extremely professional and incredibly talented. She works very hard at what she does and it’s no accident that she’s such a great star.
Jodie is just the most incredible find. When we had the show in development, which is going back several years, we used to say that the success of it would largely depend on finding a Villanelle. If we couldn’t find someone to play Villanelle, we didn’t have a show. We were so fortunate to get Jodie. She has developed the role, taken it off the page and created something which goes far beyond it.
What has Emerald Fennell brought to season two?
Phoebe Waller-Bridge created the tone of the show in season one, and we’ve been extremely fortunate in Emerald taking it on. Nobody could ever replace Phoebe and you can’t slip into her shoes, but Emerald has completely got the tone of the show and has taken it on another step. She has brought something fresh to season two, something that we didn’t have in season one, and she’s enabled us to take the story further.
