The Day of the Jackal is here once again

Thursday, 7 November 2024

More than 50 years after Frederick Forsyth’s critically acclaimed 1971 novel became an award-winning movie, The Day of the Jackal has received a contemporary update and been transformed into a 10-part series.

Taking on the role of the British assassin-for-hire so memorably played by Edward Fox on the big screen, is Eddie Redmayne, the 42-year-old actor best-known for his performances in The Theory of Everything, Les Miserables and the Fantastic Beasts trilogy.

TV Guide recently caught up with him (along with his co-stars Lashana Lynch and Úrsula Corberó) via Zoom ahead of the show’s debut.

One of the most-interesting things about this take are the parallels between your Jackal and Lashana’s MI6 Agent Bianca character. Was that something that attracted you to the project?

As a fan of the original book and film, I found they very much had a binary sense of good and evil. It felt like the Jackal was this baddie, albeit a charismatic one, aspiring to kill the goodie in (Charles) De Gaulle. What I then found kind of intriguing when I read Ronan’s (Bennett) script, was it felt like every character was on a spectrum of good and evil. That idea, that felt very conscious in his writing, that Bianca and Jackal were two sides of the same coin and that they were both fastidious, obsessive and talented, but there was this moral ambiguity to both of them and yet they were on this collision course towards each other.

In another departure from the book and movie, we also learn much more about the Jackal’s home life, particularly his potentially crumbling relationship with wife Nuria (Corberó), as she begins to question whether he’s been telling her the truth about his vocation and overseas trips. Did you have much say in bringing that aspect to life?

I felt like all three of us were deeply protective of our characters. Ursula was constantly going, “we cannot make this woman appear stupid” and, similarly, I was asking, “what are the lies that he’s spun?” and “what job should it be that he says he’s been doing?”. What was extraordinary about the filming of this was you jump from day-to-day from shooting an action movie to shooting this quite, intense, emotional marriage story. That kept all of us on our toes.

One of the most impressive scenes early on is your character’s assembling of a gun from parts of a suitcase. How difficult was that to film?

It was bloody difficult to construct – so finickity. To be clear, we spent two days shooting me constructing that gun, because it took so long for it to be fluent. Because, when I think of the Jackal, I think of one of his characteristics as approaching things like that like a knife through butter. He’s so elegant and refined – and I am not those things. I ended up doing it to classical music to try and zen myself out and the director, Brian (Kirk), was agreeable enough to let me do that and then replaced it in the edit.

Was that the biggest challenge you had as part of this?

No, that was probably the technical elements of some of his transformations into other characters. Prosthetics are amazing, but they’re an endurance, especially when you’re wearing them while shooting in Hungary in the middle of summer. I always felt that by the time I arrived on set, after spending three-to-four hours putting them on, like I’d done my day’s work, whereas, it was just starting. And what happens is there’s nowhere for the sweat to go. So, at the end, they have to prick your prosthetic with a pin and ooze out the sweat. That was kind of disgusting and that, I found, was the biggest struggle.

Yes, one of the unique things about the Jackal is that you have to play a character who specialises in portraying other people, as well as creating a persona for the man himself. How did you tackle that?

I went to Cadiz (in Spain), where Ronan the writer lives, to meet with him at the beginning of the project. Like the Jackal, he is a chess-obsessive, a bird watcher, which I thought was quite interesting. I definitely felt like there were elements of him in the character. I also worked with this wonderful movement coach called Alexandra Reynolds and we were doing some work together on some characters and she found this interview with David Bowie, I think from the ‘70s. It’s one of the first where he’s not in huge makeup or an extreme look and he’s being interrogated by this journalist. The physicality and the manner, his quietness and the kind of stillness, the inscrutability with which he speaks, but also the way he describes why he wears different guises, different personas, was insightful somehow – and I tried to use it.

The Day of the Jackal TVNZ+ and Duke, Fridays from November 15.