Killing Eve producer says all-white writers’ room is ‘not good enough’

‘We’ve all had long talks and lots of soul-searching ... but we’ve got to do better’

The executive producer for the hit BBC crime series Killing Eve has reacted to criticism of the programme’s all-white writers’ room.

Speaking during the SeriesFest virtual panel Killing Eve: Behind the Lens, Sally Woodward Gentle said the situation was “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. “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.”

Gentle 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.”

Killing Eve was criticised recently after writer Kayleigh Llewellyn posted a photo on social media showing a video call between the season 4 writers, in which everyone pictured was white.

Sandra Oh, who plays the co-lead Eve Polastri on the show, said that the UK is behind the US when it comes to diversity in TV production.

“The UK, I’m not afraid to say, is behind,” she said. “I’m not only the only Asian person on set – sometimes it changes, [it’s] very exciting when someone comes on set.”

The development of people behind the camera is very slow in the UK. I don’t know about the rest of Europe. Sometimes it would be me and 75 white people.”