The executive producer of the Sandra Oh-fronted show has responded to backlash over the lack of writers of color working on the award-winning television series.
- Jul 2, 2020
AceShowbiz - "Killing Eve" executive producer Sally Woodward Gentle has promised to improve diversity on the show's writing team after criticism over the lack of writers of colour working on the show.
A post on Twitter by a writer, Kayleigh Llewellyn, which showed that every season four writer on a final day Zoom call was white, sparked a backlash against "Killing Eve" producers, who have been praised for giving women major creative roles and casting Asian-American Sandra Oh as the title character.
According to Britain's NME website, Gentle addressed the issue during a recent SeriesFest virtual panel, "Killing Eve: Behind the Lens", promising to do better and hire a more diverse team going forward.
"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. "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."
The show's boss added that the criticism, which came as the Black Lives Matter protests highlighted racial injustice across the world, has provoked much "soul-searching" among her team.
"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," Gentle explained.
"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. I think this is an extraordinary moment, and we've got to make a difference. It's not good enough."
Oh, who stars as Eve, had previously told Variety magazine during a chat with Kerry Washington, "The development of people behind the camera is very slow in the U.K. Sometimes it would be me and 75 white people."
