As Emmy nominations approach, Vanity Fair’s HWD team is diving deep into how some of this season’s greatest scenes and characters came together.

THE SCENE: KILLING EVE SEASON 1, EPISODE 5

At roughly the midpoint of Killing Eve’s eight-episode first season , MI5 agent Eve Polastri (Sandra Oh) and the woman she’s been hunting, globe-trotting assassin Villanelle (Jodie Comer), share their first real interaction. Set in Eve’s kitchen over some microwaved shepherd’s pie, it’s a sequence Oh described as a dance—Fred and Ginger spinning madly. The director of the episode, Jon East, called it a home invasion—which, technically, it is, as Villanelle has broken in without permission. From her character’s perspective, said Comer, it’s just a nice meal between friends, while series creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge imagined it as a wolf (Villanelle) coming to have tea with a mouse (Eve).

The food, the table, the two acting dynamos, and the much-anticipated confrontation between hunter and hunted may also prompt some movie buffs to think of the famous diner scene in Heat where Al Pacino and Robert De Niro exchange barbs over coffee. (That’s a comparison, for the record, that hadn’t occurred to Waller-Bridge, though she was delighted by it.) However you want to describe this moment, it’s the kind of powerful scene that signals to the viewer that Killing Eve is more than just a great show—it’s potentially a classic. Comer, Oh, East, and Waller-Bridge spoke with Vanity Fair about all the glycerine, fake meat, and sexual awakening that went into this show-stopping Killing Eve face-off.

How It Started

Waller-Bridge wrote the emotionally complex and uncommonly long two-hander out of order and in a rush, months before it was shot, so that actress Jodie Comer could have some material to work with during her audition. Though some slight material was later added to the scene, her initial, nine-page raw take on the meeting of Villanelle and Eve is almost identical to the finished product. “Phoebe just threw it out there,” Oh said. “She just came up with it.” With Oh already cast as Eve, Comer only had two days to memorize nine pages of dialogue that would determine if she was the right actress to play Oh’s foil, Villanelle.

In order to make the younger actress feel more at ease, Oh brought in props, including cups, water, cutlery, and—because she couldn’t find a meat pie on short notice in Los Angeles—a blueberry pie for Comer to chow down on. Villanelle’s relationship with food is vitally important to her character generally, and to this scene specifically. Oh, Waller-Bridge, and Comer all pointed out how the assassin is devouring •everything* in the scene, including, suggestively, the pie. While some performers, mindful of long hours and repeated takes, might nibble on food while shooting a scene, Comer said that in both the audition and the final take, she really went for it: “I had to be rolled out of the audition room.”