In ‘The Day of the Jackal,’ Eddie Redmayne’s Shape-Shifting Assassin Meets His Match

The Day of the Jackal opens on a German janitor seemingly going about his evening. He’s in his 60s, moves a little slower than he used to, and minds his own business. He’s got a smoker’s cough. He’s quiet. We glean rather quickly, though, that this is a façade. The man (beware, spoilers as to who!) is on a mission and has a target. As the tension ratchets up, we follow the janitor through a nail-biting heist sequence. He gets the job done, makes his way home, and heads to the bathroom to clean up. This process includes him rather literally removing his face.

For the audience, an understandable reaction might be: Wait, that was Eddie Redmayne the whole time?

The reveal sets up 10 hours of double-crosses and deceptions. It’s not the only time you’ll see Redmayne, as the titular Jackal, assuming an unrecognizable disguise. “One of the things I love about acting is getting to shift what you look like and how you sound,” Redmayne tells Vanity Fair. “We certainly had room to play.”

This feels appropriate for Peacock and Sky’s new take on The Day of the Jackal (premiering November 7), adapted by Ronan Bennett from Frederick Forsyth’s classic 1971 cat-and-mouse novel—and made with great affection for the 1973 film of the same name, which went on to box office and awards success. Fifty-plus years later, executive producers Gareth Neame and Nigel Marchant (Downton Abbey, The Last Kingdom) wanted to take the bones of the story, about a professional assassin contracted for a perilous new job, and apply them to a contemporary setting. Marchant acknowledges the trickiness of the sell: “You’re always nervous about taking these things on, because you don’t want to spoil the original—why do it, and why now?”

While we have Redmayne in the mysterious titular role and many cheeky references to the original, this Jackal feels both expanded and rebranded. For starters, instead of the low-fi transformational methods employed in the novel—shoe polish, wigs—this series meets the modern moment, acknowledging that some crafty passport forgery would no longer get the job done. “We’re photographed and videoed all the time now, so how can this person be chameleonic? How can he change his identity?” Marchant says. “That’s where we got into the prosthetics and how we changed [Eddie’s] appearance.” The extensive makeup and costume work makes for both entertaining viewing and a commentary on how a man like this would need to operate in the 2020s.

Redmayne is no stranger to such physical work, having won an Oscar for his portrayal of Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything and still deep into his decorated run on Broadway as Cabaret’s Emcee. He worked with his frequent movement coach Alex Reynolds on the many faces of the Jackal. “We found this brilliant interview of David Bowie back from the ’70s or ’80s, a rare occasion in which he was interviewed just as himself rather than any huge costumes,” Redmayne says. “He was talking about using costume and makeup and personas as a disguise to mask himself. That was intriguing.”

The show also delves more into its antihero’s private life, involving a new character played by Úrsula Corberó—a big jump from the source material, which kept the Jackal at a great remove. Redmayne felt the challenge of that added psychological depth: “Could you make someone who is doing these horrific things someone an audience still wanted to succeed?”

The answer to that dilemma lurked in the very DNA of Day of the Jackal. To make us care about the Jackal, the show would need to introduce a delicious new adversary.

Lashana Lynch thought she was done with the spy genre. “After visiting Bond and after having been a member of MI6 through that character, I was hesitant to go back into that world and repeat myself and not have anything new to talk about,” she says. Between The Woman King and her recent dips into the MCU, Lynch had also performed several physically demanding roles in a row. “I wasn’t looking for stunts, okay? I was looking for the opposite,” she says with a laugh. “I was looking for kitchen-sink drama that would challenge my brain but wouldn’t challenge my body in the way The Woman King did.”

Then The Day of the Jackal came Lynch’s way.

The actor brings incredible presence to Bianca, the relentless British intelligence officer hot on the Jackal’s tail. The previous book and movie version of this story featured a man as the counterpart, but Neame and Marchant knew this was one area where they wanted to shake things up. “She’s a great actress and can dig into the emotion and yet has a brilliant physicality to her,” Marchant says. “You believe that these are worthy opponents”—even though Bianca and the Jackal are on parallel journeys, trying to outsmart one another from afar. “We were passing ships in the night,” as Lynch puts it. No spoilers as to whether—and, if so, how—they’ll eventually collide.

Lynch and Redmayne did get to know each other well, with both in active producer roles and, appropriately for such an intense story, often running into each other at the gym where they’d train. “We were like, ‘So we’re really doing this—how’s your training going?’” Lynch recalls. “‘Well, I’m tired.’ ‘Oh, I’m tired too. Fantastic.’ ‘All right, so we can be tired together?’ ‘Great.’” Both were aligned on the series’ tone, emotion, pacing, and aesthetic. This was especially important because the show finds layers of commonality between them—a hallmark of any cat-and-mouse story, but here realized with a rigor that reinforces the show’s major themes.

“They have a really complex moral compass and do horrendous things, but are also extraordinarily talented,” Redmayne says. “You’re drawn to them and repelled by them in equal measure.”

When it came to Bianca, Lynch assumed a central role in shaping her psychology and backstory. (This is Lynch’s first producing credit.) “She’s actually from a fairly similar area to me, around the corner from where I grew up. I recognized a lot in her that she was struggling with as a human being and as a Black woman,” Lynch says. “Being one of the producers on the show, I knew I could ensure that that storyline was taken care of and that I was feeding something in me as an artist that was pushing my boundaries.”

With various directors coming in, Redmayne—performing his first TV role in more than a decade—adds that he and Lynch were crucial anchors for the production. “We were the continuity, so our eye and our attention to detail had to be pretty rigorous,” he says, before admitting that this overlapped with his character’s methods just a smidge. “Certainly, the Jackal’s microscopic sense of detail played into my own work on this.”

The original Day of the Jackal book opens on a failed, fictional assassination attempt on French president Charles de Gaulle. This series, while also purely fiction, intently reflects the chaos of modern life. It will premiere just days after the 2024 US presidential election—and, against anyone’s possible expectations, in the aftermath of an assassination attempt on the Republican nominee, former president Donald Trump.

All involved with The Day of the Jackal hope viewers can separate the show from real-world events. “What happened was horrific, and to be absolutely clear, this is a reimagining of an original IP, and it’s in no way aiming to glorify gun violence or in any sense endorse real-life actions,” Redmayne says. Neame adds, “We’re interested in just bringing an audience on a high-octane, rollercoaster thriller across Europe—we’re not really involved in real contemporary, political, or other events.”

Indeed, the show does offer a certain degree of escapism, with the fine performances and craftsmanship elevating an intently familiar espionage drama. The show was filmed all over Europe, prioritizing elaborate and glamorous on-location setpieces and a sense of dizzying dislocation. You can never get too comfortable anywhere.

Neame reminds us, though, that as with the original Jackal—in which the eponymous character is initially referred to as “the Englishman”—Britishness is at the core of what they hope to offer viewers, wherever they may be watching the series. “We want to do something that’s expressly British and that no one else is doing,” he says with a smile. This includes the Jackal himself. “While also being a big global star, Eddie is quintessentially English. That felt so right to us.”

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