Phoebe Waller-Bridge: Why I give female characters a lot of wallop

FLEABAG creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge says viewers are tired of seeing women being ‘brutalised’ on TV — so it was empowering to ramp up female violence in Killing Eve.

‘We’re being allowed to see women on slabs the whole time and being beaten up, and in some ways that’s important to see because it shows the brutality against women,’ she told The Andrew Marr Show on BBC One.

‘Seeing women being violent, the flipside of that, is refreshing and oddly empowering.’ The BBC drama Killing Eve, starring Jodie Comer as a psychopathic killer and Sandra Oh as an MI5 operative, is set to return for a second series.

Waller-Bridge (pictured) said: ‘Strangely, there’s hardly any blood; there’s hardly any gruesomeness that we were allowed to show. The challenge was to make it feel very violent without actually showing anything.’ She told Marr she had ‘always had a penchant for the outrageous end of humour’.

Her Fleabag character makes comments that ‘don’t align with the message’ such as she would ‘take two years off her life to have a hot body’.

Speaking of feminism, she added: ‘There are so many potholes in the road. It’s kind of frightening and you want to be able to say the right things.’

Author: Sherna Noah