Killing Eve EP Sally Woodward Gentle Responds to Criticism Over the Show's Writers' Room

From Town & Country

In mid-June, writer Kayleigh Llewellyn shared a (now-deleted) photo of Killing Eve's writers room, a group which appears to be entirely white, cheers-ing to the camera on Twitter.

"15 weeks later, it's the final day of the Killing Eve writers room," she wrote, punctuating her post with a heart emoji.

Now, the show's executive producer Sally Woodward Gentle has responded to the backlash the photo generated, and has also addressed the show's lack of diversity behind the scenes.

Last week during a panel about Killing Eve at SeriesFest—a virtual festival focused on episodic storytelling—Gentle admitted that the current state of diversity in the show's writer's room is "not good enough."

"The make-up of the room should be more racially diverse than it is, and we're really aware of that and I take full responsibility for it," she said, per Digital Spy.

"You look at that room and it's full of brilliant female writers, we've got a really strong LGBTQ contingent, but it's not good enough and we need to do better.

"Killing Eve should be able to do better," she continued.

"We've all had long talks and lots of soul-searching and we can come up with excuses, we can come up with platitudes, we can talk about the people that we've spoken about in the past, but we've got to do better. All of our writers know we've got to do better."

While she was light on details, she noted the need for concrete steps on a path to change.

"But also, the production from the ground up–the entire production–we're looking at in terms of how we can make concrete change, because it's incredibly important to us and it's got to be change that lasts and is effective," she said.

"I think this is an extraordinary moment, and we've got to make a difference. It's not good enough."

Sandra Oh, who stars as the titular Eve in the series, recently commented on how she's accustomed to being the only Asian woman on television sets.

"Being the sole Asian person is a very familiar place for me," she told Kerry Washington in a recent interview as part of Variety's Actors on Actors series. Oh also noted that the UK is behind the U.S. in terms of diversity behind the scenes on set.

"Sometimes it would be like me and 75 white people," Oh said.

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