Sandra Oh reveals the Killing Eve pilot scene that was cut but eventually used in the final season

Scenes get cut. Show creators change their minds. It happens… quite regularly.

But it's less common for that once-scrapped footage to find its way back into an episode, seasons later. In the case of Killing Eve, the scene that creator and writer Phoebe Waller-Bridge originally intended to open the series with — Sandra Oh's Eve and her co-workers letting loose at karaoke night — eventually found a place in the show's penultimate episode of its recent fourth and final season.

"When [the season 4 karaoke scene] came about, the writers said — because episode 7 is kind of Eve's most thoughtful episode and I needed an emotional charge to that episode — so they said, 'Oh, she's going to sing karaoke,'" Oh says on the latest episode of EW's The Awardist podcast. "And I knew what they could not possibly know was that there is footage from the pilot that was never put into the show… So that karaoke scene was the original opening to Killing Eve, [the night before the pilot starts]."

Oh realized a big opportunity in connecting the two moments, to demonstrate "how much her life has changed, how much she has lost, the stakes of it all. So it was great to see that footage… and then you can have the comparison. Because I will say, when we were doing some press, Jodie [Comer] and I saw a picture of us from the first season and we were both like, 'Oh my God, who is that?' We both felt — and I absolutely felt so strongly — that Eve changed completely physically, and I really wanted to start the season strong with her change because, one, I thought it was right dramatically, and action-wise I wanted to put her in a very, very active place. So let's start this change and then push it into where I've always felt this show is a more thoughtful or existential place. Because this show is about the inside of a woman's head… and how we deal with the largest structures that are trying to kill us. So for me, I wanted to push that into an interior emotional place where you could see that change."

Another big change for Oh this year was also starring in the Netflix comedy The Chair, in which she plays the chair of a college English department and single mom to an adopted daughter. Oh explains the similarities she feels as an actor to her character's profession, the show's "messy and alienating" depiction of motherhood, what she'd like to explore in a second season of the series, and more.

Parrish Lewis/HBO Max; Ian Watson/HBO Max; Anika Molnar/BBCA Himesh Patel, Mackenzie Davis, and Sandra Oh join EW's 'The Awardist' podcast

Elsewhere, Station Eleven stars Mackenzie Davis and Himesh Patel discuss the "really, really strange" experience, as Patel describes it, of filming a show about life post-pandemic during an actual pandemic, and the unexpected toll that not being able to fully interact with the cast and crew took.

"We began shooting with episode 7, which is a very intense episode, very emotional. And we were having to go to these sorts of emotional places and were carried by all these wonderful professionals, but I didn't know what any of them looked like [because of masks]," Patel says. "For me personally, I got my sort of end to that story on my last day, when we were shooting outside and production got some cupcakes as a sort of send-off for me. And so people had to pull their masks down to eat the cupcake and I actually got to their face, finally. And it was actually a really emotional moment for me — these people that I, at that point, had then been working with for four months and that's the first time actually seeing their face, not what I'd made up in my head of their face. And it was really lovely."

Emotions were also high when Davis' Kirsten sees Patel's Jeevan for the first time in several years (Kirsten was played by Matilda Lawler in earlier scenes), both assuming the other had probably died somewhere, somehow.

"Himesh and I were pretty aligned that the enormity of that experience was such that you couldn't capture it in words, that anything would be trite," Davis says of the characters' reunion and how they chose to play it. "No matter how beautifully written it was or right on the money, is there's no words for… One, you're alive, and I'm frozen in time in his mind as a 13-, 12-year-old, 11, preteen-era, little girl. Alive or dead, that's the only Kirsten he ever knew, and then he's confronted with a woman who's very tall and a full woman… There's no way to articulate what we meant to each other in that time, and what he meant to me, and what it means to know that he's alive. And the sort of almost heartbreak that he's alive as well, because if he was dead then he didn't leave me. I mean, there's just so many things going on in that moment that to try and be like, 'It's you' — anything sucks."

Listen to the full episode of The Awardist below, in which EW critic Kristen Baldwin joins host Gerrad Hall to discuss the many potential double nominees this year, including Oh, Julia Garner, Oscar Isaac, Elle Fanning, Kieran Culkin, and Laurie Metcalf, and why Baldwin thinks Pachinko deserves more attention and to be nominated.

Check out more from EW's The Awardist, featuring exclusive interviews, analysis, and our podcast diving into all the highlights from the year's best in TV.

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• Station Eleven's Mackenzie Davis on the importance of creative discord on set