It was one of the most talked-about, pored over dramas of 2018. Now Killing Eve has given viewers a first glimpse of its highly-anticipated second season.

Jodie Comer and Sandra Oh are reprising their roles as unsettlingly likeable assassin Villanelle and obsessive M15 operative Eve Polastri, as television’s most tantalising cat-and-mouse tale returns. 

The trailer picks up where last season’s cliffhanger ending left off, opening with a shaken, blood-stained Eve talking on the phone

“I’ve found Villanelle,” she says. “I think I might have killed her.”

While viewers last saw the ruthless assassin have her own brush with death in an altercation with Eve, it seems she is back to her old tricks for the series’ second instalment. 

Clambering from a hospital bed, she commences the torment of the spy as the pair battle to bring their ill-fated relationship to a likely bloody conclusion.

One clip shows the doe-eyed killer rifling through a kitchen drawer, looking for a knife. When asked why, she matter-of-factly replies: “To stab you with.”

The trailer, which features a slowed-down cover of Robert Palmer’s music hit Addicted To Love, also shows Eve receiving funeral flowers that spell out her own name.

The show continues to blur the lines between predator and prey, with Eve’s MI6 boss, Carolyn Martens, asking: “Why are the two of you so interested in each other?”

Alongside Comer and Oh,  Fiona Shaw, who plays Martens, is among cast members to return.

They will be joined by W1A stars Nina Sosanya and Edward Bluemel, as well as a rumoured guest appearance from comedian Julien Barratt. 

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Since it first aired last year, Killing Eve has proved a hit with viewers and critics.
The series became the second biggest boxset to air on BBC iPlayer, with more than 40 million requests since it arrived on the streaming service.

It also won a string of awards, with Sandra Oh collecting a Golden Globe for Best Actress In A TV Drama this year, alongside similar gongs from the Critics’ Choice Television Awards and Screen Actors Guild.

Executive producers previously promised “some surprises” for the show’s second season, including filming stints in Rome, Paris and Holland.

Sally Woodward Gentle, who produces the show alongside Lee Morrison, said: “Eve may be even darker than she thought she was and more people may die.”

Oh told how the spy will be pushed to her limits, explaining that there’s a “lot of energy” at the beginning of the new season that “pushes them into a different place of vulnerability”.

The suspense-laden thriller, which is based on Luke Jennings’s Codename Villanelle novella series, was developed for television by director and actress Phoebe Waller-Bridge.

The Fleabag showrunner will assume the role of executive producer for season two, but has passed the head writer mantle to Emerald Fennell, who stars in Call The Midwife. 

Their involvement has seen the show lauded for its female representation, both in front and behind the camera.

Speaking on a panel last month, Fennell said: “I think as women, as actors, writers, directors, or producers, we’re used to being the cement, and men are the bricks.

"So we fill in the cracks, we take up the space that we have and try to make it work. But on this show we’re the bricks.”

Killing Eve airs on BBC America on April 7 with a UK date to be announced.