Killing Eve’s grisly Villanelle murders are all based on REAL assassinations
AS if Killing Eve wasn't gruesome enough, it turns out all of assassin Villanelle's murders do not come from the writers' imaginations but are actually based on real kills.
Villanelle's hit on a business mogul using perfume was inspired by the murder of Kim Jong Un's brother.
The BBC America show follows the bizarre relationship of killer-for-hire Villanelle (Jodie Comer) and Eve (Sandra Oh), the MI5 agent tasked with catching the psychopath.
Produced and formerly written by Fleabag's Phoebe Waller-Bridge, the show has become a worldwide smash thanks to Villanelle's over the top style.
But now BBC's security correspondent Gordon Corera has lifted the lid on the inspiration behind some of the show's most gruesome murders.
Gordon made a "kill list"; for show producers to make the world of spies and assassins seem realistic.
"I was like 'yeah' and they said could you help us come up with some ways of killing people and I was like 'ok'.
"So I went away and wrote this document called the Kill List which is somewhere on my laptop. It's basically a load of different ways to kill people, but crazy quirky ways.
"I took some things that happened 50 years ago, some that had been in the news, some that you hear about in other places and just passed that on and of course they used some of them.
He added: "And they gave that Killing Eve 'zing' to some of the ideas that I had and I think that's what the writer's are great at."
One such quirky murder was not that far moved from reality and saw Villanelle kill a perfume mogul with a spritz of fragrance.
That scene was based on the real life murder in 2017 of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un's brother Kim Jong-nam.
Jong-nam was at Kuala Lumpur airport when two women - Doan Thi Huong, from Vietnam and Indonesian Siti Aisyah - allegedly rushed him and sprayed an unidentified liquid on him, both later had charges against them dropped.
It was later revealed in the autopsy that the banned VX nerve agent was found on his face, eyes, in his blood, urine, clothing and bag, with many people believing the North Korean leader was behind his own brother's assassination.
The life of Russian spies, like Villanelle, is not all the work of fiction as the 2018 Novichok poisonings in Salisbury revealed to the world.
Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov were linked to a botched assassination attempt former MI6 mole Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia.
The pair flew from Russia and stayed in a cheap East London hotel, before heading to the cathedral town where they rubbed Novichok poison on the pair's hotel doorknob, which they had smuggled into the country in a Premier Jour perfume bottle.
Gordon said the Salisbury proves Russian spies are real: "One of the things that we've seen in the last few years is that Russia really does have assassins. It really does send people out."
Even the iconic Villanelle was not borne entirely from Phoebe Waller-Bridge's imagination, with the writer admitting she based her lead on the notorious serial killer Angela Simpson.
Angela said she was "not at all" remorseful for torturing and killing a disabled man in Phoenix, Arizona and even laughed about it in a TV interview after asking the crew to "make her look good".
In 2009 she impaled, stabbed and strangled Terry Nealy, before extracting his teeth and dismembered his body before setting pieces of him on fire.
Phoenix police described it as "one of the most heinous homicide cases the department has ever seen".
Angela plead guilty to first-degree murder in 2012 and was sentenced to life in prison and said she hoped she would get the opportunity to "kill again".
But for Phoebe that TV interview with Angela was like "gold dust".
She told the NY Times last year: "She sounds more like a psycho than anyone has ever sounded."
Other gruesome deaths in the show include stabbing a man in the eye with a hair pin, pouring saffron down a person's throat and impaling someone with a hay fork.
But Villanelle might get her own back after the show's producers teased she might meet a "horrible revenge".
Speaking about the killing frenzy, show runner Suzanne Heathcote told The Hollywood Reporter: "In the writers room, we were trying to think of things that made each other gasp, or cover our faces and laugh with horror — anything that gets a visceral reaction.
"That's the challenge of a third season: what can we do to surprise the audience, while staying true to the world?"
Killing Eve is available to stream on BBC iPlayer.
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