We’re so used to seeing violence that we forget what it would feel like, but that’s why the murder in Episode 8 is so important. It is incredibly violent, and I think the audience needs to feel what it would be like to kill someone. It’s got to be unbelievably distressing and violent and horrible to kill someone if you don’t know what you’re doing.

There’s an argument that it may feel too violent, but for me I think it’s actually much worse to show death in a way that just feels bloodless. It felt to me that this is how distressing it would be. This stuff is all incredibly sexy and compelling, but this is also what it is.

Part of the show is about wish fulfillment, but a lot of this series for me is about saying, if you love Villanelle, which we all do because she’s heaven, can you still love her if she misunderstands a situation so much that she kills a child?

We saw Eve really changing this season, moving closer and closer to Villanelle and her world.

We all want Eve to go bad, but the pleasure of “Killing Eve,” for me, is showing it in a way that is far more honest and weird and distressing than what we expect. Because the truth is so much weirder and creepier, particularly for women, because we spend so much of our time hiding how we feel, particularly when it comes to sex and anger and all those kinds of dark emotions.

What’s really driving Eve, beyond the obsession with Villanelle?

She really, really believes in good versus evil in a very large and almost biblical way. And we talked a lot at the beginning of the creative process about “Paradise Lost” and about Eve being Eve, Carolyn [Fiona Shaw] being a cold God figure and Villanelle being the tempting snake. Eve is trying constantly to be good, and it just is unfortunate that that’s taken her full circle basically.

And Niko, Eve’s husband, is such a good foil for her. He doesn’t have big designs to change the world, and yet his is definitely a quiet kind of good.