'Killing Eve' producer addresses lack of racial diversity among show's writers
Killing Eve’s executive producer Sally Woodward Gentle has said the writers room on the programme should be "more racially diverse" than it currently is.
It comes after a Zoom chat screenshot of the show's season 4 writers sparked controversy after being shared by writer Kayleigh Llewellyn in a now-deleted tweet due to the team being all white.
"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," Woodward Gentle said in a SeriesFest panel titled 'Killing Eve: Behind the Lens', according to Digital Spy.
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"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. We should do better on a show like – Killing Eve should be able to do better.
"And 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."
It also comes as Eve Polastri star Sandra Oh recently said the UK is "behind" when it comes to racial diversity in television.
In conversation with Kerry Washington on Variety’s Actors On Actors series Oh, who was born in Canada to Korean parents, said: “Being the sole Asian person is a very familiar place for me. But the UK, I’m not afraid to say, is behind."
“I am not only the only Asian person on set, sometimes it changes, very exciting when that does and someones comes on set, but the development of people behind the camera is very slow in the UK."
The actor, who starred in Shonda Rhimes' Grey's Anatomy, added that her relationship with television in the US has "not always been all white".
