What’s the biggest challenge for the show in season 2? Is it sustaining this cat-and-mouse game?

OH: For me, it’s the: How do you keep the storytelling of the impossible romance? How do you move from a cat and mouse to a cat and cat? Like cats playing with each other. And how do you move [from] the expectation of it into the truth of the characters? It’s like, how do they be together? Or not. How do they be separate? I think that has definitely been a creative challenge.

COMER: I think so too. At the end, their characters are in a very different place now. A lot of relationships were challenged, and it’s a different stage in the journey, and trusting it and finding this new energy.

I heard that the filming of a pasta-eating scene with Villanelle almost led to an untimely demise.

COMER: Oh. My. God!

OH: That was scary!

COMER: This is actually really triggering. I told my brother about it and he was like, “I love this. Of all the things that could have killed Villanelle, it was a mouthful of pasta.” [Laughs]

What happened?

COMER: It’s a scene where she’s eating some pasta in a very grotesque way. She’s trying to prove a point about something. She’s playing it up, being her usual childish self, and the pasta was extremely dry. And it was extremely thick. I was shoveling it in, and then it just shot down my throat and then I was full-on choking. They must have it on camera — a medic came in and managed to get it out, but my life definitely flashed before me…. I just remember being opposite the other actor and looking at him, and he thought I was making a weird acting choice. So yeah, it’s ruined pasta for me completely.

OH: [To Comer] It’s only funny because you’re fine.

COMER: Honestly, I was full-on crying. It was my most dangerous Villanelle moment.

How much change — how much humanity — is possible in this psychopath?

COMER: With Villanelle, I think it’s important that we never find too much humanity within her…

OH: But we want to! We want to!

COMER: I think she doesn’t know how to deal with the emotions that she feels, and when she’s feeling something, it’s something that she suppresses. So it’s something that we’ve explored a lot because that’s what the audience enjoys and they feel like they get to know her and—

OH: —[we] pull it away.

COMER: Ultimately, she is someone who is dangerous and never should be underestimated, but it’s why people connect with her. Because she does have a level of humanity. She makes you laugh, and you find her relatable sometimes. That’s the conflict that the audience has when watching her. I think with both characters, it’s not black-and-white. Neither of them is good or evil.

OH: All I can say is that they’re in certain situations that push Eve to the limit and Villanelle just…pushes her over. [Laughs]

COMER: Just a little poke. No biggie.

And how much of Eve is lost in this pursuit of Villanelle?

OH: All. I gotta tell you, absolutely that’s what you’re going to see in the second [season]. Then it becomes not even about Villanelle; it’s just like, what is she pursuing that she cannot let go of?… Eve’s drive or desire to get the job done — it’s actually not a job — is a big driving force with her character and her movement in the second season. And I think it bites her [affects British accent] in the buttocks.

What has this spy thriller with a complex female point of view — behind the camera and in front of it — meant to the fans you’ve encountered on the street?

COMER: What I’ve really picked up on is the connection that people have had with Villanelle’s sexuality. [She has] really resonated with the LGBT community, and I know through speaking with Luke Jennings [who wrote Codename Villanelle, the book that served as the basis for the show], he has had so many people write to him and say that they feel seen and are enjoying the fact that this woman is celebrating that. You can have these relationships with women, this fascination, this compulsiveness to know this, and I don’t think that I’ve ever really seen that explored on television. It’s looking into the female psyche and being written by a woman who has an understanding and a knowledge and—

OH: —a very unique and specific point of view on how she wants to express and be in collaboration with two other female psyches.

Image zoom James White for EW