Villanelle

"Don't speak to me like that, Eve. I like you but I don’t like you that much. Don’t forget: the only thing that makes you interesting is me."

- Villanelle to Eve Polastri. "Take me to the hole!"

- Villanelle after killing Nadia – and also one of her most famous quotes. "You love me. I love you. I do. (Eve: You don’t understand what that is.) I do. You’re mine. (Eve: No!) You are, you’re mine! Eve! I thought you were special."

- Villanelle’s mental breakdown after Eve rejects her, and just before she shoots her.

Villanelle is the titular central antagonist of the Villanelle novel series written by Luke Jennings, and one of the two main protagonists of the live-action television adaption on BBC America, . She is the titular main antagonist of the 2018 novel Codename Villanelle and a protagonist villain in the 2019 sequel Killing Eve: No Tomorrow. In the TV series, she appears as the main antagonist of Season 1 and the deuteragonist villain of Season 2. She is set to return in Season 3.

While her real name is Oxana Vorontsova in the novels, Villanelle's real name in the TV series is instead Oksana Astankova.

She is a psychopathic, highly-trained and unpredictable hired Russian assassin who worked for an organization known as the Twelve. She develops an obsession with British Intelligence operative Eve Polastri, who is equally obsessed with her and tracking her down, which results in a game of cat-and-mouse between the two of them.

In the TV series, she is portrayed by.

Personality
"Eve: I know you are exceptionally bright, determined, hard-working. I know you are an extraordinary person. I know something happened to you. I know that you’re a psychopath. Villanelle: You should never tell a psychopath they are a psychopath. It upsets them."

- Villanelle to Eve after the latter talks about her psychopathy.

Being a proper psychopath to the bone, Villanelle possesses a cold brutality which is masked by her innocent-looking exterior. Contentedly living outside of any human moral code, Villanelle kills with flair, recklessness and absolutely no conscience. Because Villanelle had nothing before her life as a purpose-built killer, she would follow her instructions to, without question, assassinate individuals around the world. She didn’t care how many people have to die, as long as it brought her a lifestyle that she loved. Villanelle can be adorable, playful, funny, frightening, warm, chilling, vulnerable and impenetrable; exactly anything that people would want her to be. While she has proven to be queer, Villanelle has a preference for women as they are whom she mostly seduces or engages intimacy with. She also has particular tastes in lifestyles, as he likes national anthems and classical music, and whatever clothes she would wear. At times, she would see the clothes other people wear and shows disgust.

At times, Villanelle can possess a child-like behavior, throwing quiet tantrums whenever things weren’t going her way and also playing practical jokes on people she comes across. She takes great pleasure in pushing the boundaries with her eternally patient handler Konstantin. While Villanelle's native language is Russian, she does not like speaking the language and usually refuses to do so. She is also fluent in speaking English, French, Spanish, German, and Italian and is learning Mandarin. When Eve refused Villanelle's love for her, she reacted childishly and then shot her afterwards. She also has a dislike in working with other assassins, in which she seduced Nadia into killing Diego before running her down shortly afterwards. She developed a resentment towards her former lover and teacher Anna, possibly due to calling her a crazy monster and letting her get arrested for killing her husband. She would often become unsettled when her name was brought up and didn’t want to think about her.

Villanelle outwardly appears charismatic, charming, funny, polite and engaging, but yet, she has a look in eye that displays that she has a void that’s hard to describe. It's impossible to know what she is thinking or feeling, because something is missing. It is also unknown if she feels anything at all. When she becomes close to Eve, Villanelle claims that although she doesn’t feel anything, she feels things when Eve’s around, meaning that she is not fully incapable of remorse or emotion. She has on multiple occasions explained that she is always bored with life, trying endlessly to find ways of entertaining herself the way she pleases. During her killings, Villanelle prefers to watch her victims in the eye as they die, showing her fascination in death.

She is also arrogant, egotistical and impulsive, which is what lets her down at times. Her ego requires her to feel essential and invincible, as when she develops her infamous obsession with Eve Polastri, her natural state of mind becomes concerning and she starts acting unusually without forethought. It has led to her making mistakes, such as allowing Eve to find her which then led to the discovery of her real name, background and ties to the Twelve. During their confrontation in Villanelle's apartment, her arrogance let her guard down and resulted in Eve stabbing her and almost killing her.

Appearances
"Her hair is dark blonde, maybe honey. It was tied back. Uh, she was slim, about 25, 26. She had very delicate features. Her eyes are sort of catlike. Wide, but alert. Her lips are full, she has a long neck, high cheek bones. Skin is smooth and bright. She had a lost look in her eye that was both direct and also chilling. She's totally focused yet almost entirely inaccessible."

- Eve Polastri describing Villanelle.

Villanelle's natural look depicts her as having long honey-like blonde hair with hazel-colored eyes and stands at 5' 8". Whenever on missions, she would often wear a wig to depict herself as a brunette with a fringe. Villanelle's best feature is that she is very fashionable and spends most of the money she earns from her kills on clothes that are expensive and to her personal taste. During each contract killing that she completes, she would choose which outfits she would wear for the occasion. However, she would also often wear different clothes in her daily life, and most of them are outlandish and extravagant. In one occasion, during her psychological assessment, she wore a pink prom dress while wearing boots.

Relationship with Eve Polastri
"Eve: You said you don't want anything, you don't like anything, that you're bored. Do you mean it? Villanelle: Hm. I don't know. Eve: You don't know if you're telling the truth or not? Villanelle: ... Not really. Eve: You don't feel anything? Villanelle: I feel things when I'm with you."

- Villanelle about what she feels when she’s around Eve.

Possibly her most defining trait above anything else, Villanelle is mutually obsessed with British Intelligence officer. While initially sent to follow her agent, she took a fascination to her and started behaving irrationally and going against orders from the Twelve in her pursuit for Eve. Although the two would start off as rivals, the mutual obsession became a story of two "would-be lovers" who are bound together in a twisted pas de deux.

After learning of Eve's investigation of her and that she met her before, she began acting recklessly and wanted to know more about Eve in every way possible. Konstantin even pointed out that Villanelle used to be "smarter" before Eve came into her life, implying that she has also become her weakness. Upon first meeting each other briefly in the hospital bathroom, Villanelle took an attraction to her due having hair resembling Anna’s. During an affair she was having in Berlin, she started calling the woman "Eve", signifying her increasing obsession and desire towards the agent. After getting stabbed by Eve and nearly getting killed, she took it as a sign that she was acting out on love, an emotion that she is not familiar with.

Villanelle views Eve as her equal and that the two of them are the same. However, she wanted to prove this to Eve by bringing out her inner monster. To prove this, she let herself be almost killed by Raymond from the Twelve so that Eve would act on impulse and kill him. At some distinction, she knows Eve better than most people, as when questioned by Konstantin if she hadn’t already left with Carolyn, she knew that she wouldn’t do it despite his insistence. Even when presented with multiple opportunities, Villanelle has refused to kill Eve due to her attraction and admiration towards her. After breaking into her house, she declared that she only wanted dinner and wasn’t there to kill her. She also developed a disliking towards Eve’s wardrobe, openly criticizing them after she stole her suitcase, and then replaced them with expensive ones before returning them to her.

Villanelle openly claims to Eve that while she doesn’t know what she feels most of the time, she feels whenever she around. This claim is proven true after when she started growing increasingly worried that Eve was no longer interested in her, Villanelle started becoming mentally depressed and cried, something which pleased her since she never felt sadness before. Her newfound sense of feeling emotions has made her become protective of Eve, as proven when she refused to leave her, even when Raymond was nearby and coming to kill her for the Twelve.

In the pursuit of proving herself to Eve and making sure that nobody else could have her, she went to lengths to destroy her marriage with Niko. This included using a teacher to attract his interest, make him uncomfortable during sex and implant him with the concept that Eve was no longer the women he married and loved. After Niko explained that he still loved Eve, she would then proceed to kill the teacher Gemma after she failed to do so, and possibly drive him to anger and vengeance so that the wedge between him and Eve would be driven further. After Eve refused to run away with her and didn’t reciprocate her feelings for her, Villanelle had a mental breakdown by shooting her and leaving her for dead, signifying that if she couldn’t have her, nobody else could.

Reception
Jodie Comer’s performance as well as Villanelle’s relationship with Eve Polastri were praised by both critics and audiences, in which the role won her a British Academy Television Award (BAFTA) for Best Actress and then a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series. Hannah Giorgis wrote in The Atlantic that the show's greatest success is "how alluring it makes its villain: to both Eve ... and audiences", and that Villanelle's character subverts feminine stereotypes so as to "carve a jagged space into the serial-killer canon". Willa Paskin wrote in Slate that "The disfigured, beating heart of Killing Eve is the way that Villanelle's gender and manner, her very femininity, keep our acculturated brains from being appropriately terrified of her". Describing how Villanelle "does what she always does — exploit society's misogyny by imitating a victim of it" — Emily Nussbaum wrote in The New Yorker that the potent idea that undergirds the show is that "femininity is itself a sort of sociopathy, whose performance, if you truly nail it, might be the source of ultimate power".

Trivia

 * Jodie Comer has revealed in an interview with Seth Meyer that she can't keep track of many people that Villanelle has killed.
 * She has separately revealed that her favorite kill from Season 1 was Bill Hargrave, explaining how she thought, "Villanelle, you shouldn’t have done that. Too far."
 * The brocade suit that Villanelle wore in "Don't I Know You?", which was designed by Dries Van Noten, became Comer's favorite outfit. The actress said she was planning to take it home but felt it was too much like her character.
 * Phoebe Waller-Bridge's golden rule for Villanelle has remained that no matter what danger she comes up against, "Villanelle never ever uses her beauty."
 * Villanelle wears a ring on her right thumb that is engraved, "The important thing is not what they think of me, but what I think of them".
 * Villanelle snores and is double jointed in her elbows.
 * Some commentators conjecture the name "Villanelle" was derived from the word "villainess". In The New Yorker, Jia Tolentino likened the entire Killing Eve series to the villanelle poetic form, writing that the show is about the "iteration of a recognizable pattern, its pleasures emerging in the internal twists".
 * In the novel, Villanelle chose her cover name after a favorite perfume of the Comtesse du Barry, who was guillotined in 1793 ("I shall have to be careful, then," said Oxana); while in the TV series, she taunts Eve by sending her a bottle of perfume called La Villanelle.
 * Villanelle hates cigarettes and ghosts.