In the books, Villanelle is even more cut-throat. When he crosses The Twelve and she goes on a vendetta against him, this includes her kidnapping his real daughter (and having some hilarious but brutally honest conversations about Konstantin along the way) and then having an emotional confrontation with him in which she shoots him dead before fleeing. The show portrays the relationship between Konstantin (Kim Bodnia) and Villanelle in greater detail and with more significance, with her handler and saviour from prison offering both a paternal and erotic focus for the beautiful assassin. Villanelle always had a taste for things close to violence. The perfume house added the red ribbon after she was guillotined in 1793.'' The reason she chose her codename after a perfume is revealed in the book: 'It was the favourite scent of the Comtesse du Barry.

We also learn about her various forms of training across Europe - from being put through torture and interrogation to test her resilience, to learning how to pick locks on the Isle of Dogs in London, to running and sparring drills on the Essex coast. It was this and another act of vengeance that saw her imprisoned - until she was saved from the death penalty by Konstantin Vasiliev (Kim Bodnia in the show) who saw her potential as a killer for the mysterious organisation known as The Twelve. The pair had been close and Villanelle set about killing the men who killed her father in vengeance, showing that he was one of two people that she only ever cared about. She was studying here when her father was brutally murdered by rival criminals. He paid for her to study French and Linguistics at a top Russian University, where she was awarded a medal for her shooting skills. Her father was often absent, so she was left in the care of an orphanage when he went on his missions.

Oxana had lost a parent early on when her mother died at a young age from Chernobyl-related cancer. In the novellas, Oxana Voronstova - different to the show's Oksana Astankova - is revealed to have come from an upper-class father, who was a wealthy and celebrated war veteran who later turned to a life of crime in the Mafiya. The first novella in the series, Codename Villanelle, is very forthcoming with information about Villanelle's past, unlike the series which keeps her past a bit more mysterious and unravels some secrets but not all of them.

Killing eve codename villanelle