[This story contains major spoilers from the finale of The Day of the Jackal.]
Oscar winner Eddie Redmayne says he was initially reluctant to join The Day of the Jackal when he was first approached.
“I loved the original movie and the Frederick Forsyth book. So when the first three scripts arrived in my inbox, there was a level of hesitation because you don’t want to butcher something you love,” Redmayne tells The Hollywood Reporter.
But he was sold once he realized that Peacock and Sky had modernized Fred Zinnemann’s classic 1973 big screen adaptation. “I read the first episode or two of this series and I found it so propulsive and compelling and the character so enigmatic, that I just wanted to know what happened next,” says Redmayne.
What’s more, the first season finale, which released on Thursday night, had an appealing surprise twist: Redmayne’s Jackal would kill Bianca Pullman (played by Lashana Lynch in the series) to end their international cat-and-mouse chase. That ending flips the original film adaptation of Forsyth’s classic novel, where a pursuing detective ultimately kills the Jackal just as he reloads his rifle for another shot.
“When I signed on for the series, there was an aspiration for the Jackal story to continue,” says Redmayne of The Day of the Jackal, which has already been renewed for a second season. “So I knew that was going to be the twist.”
He also felt that the chameleonic contract killer he was set to play was, as a master of disguise and accents and languages, about as impressive a performer you can get.
“One of the appeals is he [the Jackal] is an actor, and he’s relatively accomplished as an actor. He’s also a quite an ingenious makeup artist and linguist and physical transformer, and I found joy in the fact he was perhaps more comfortable when playing other characters,” Redmayne explains.
The Jackal, besides being an expert sniper, also had to pretend to be someone else to evade capture. And that’s in Redmayne’s wheelhouse after he nabbed the best actor Oscar for his role as renowned physicist Stephen Hawking in 2014’s The Theory of Everything. Redmayne worked with movement and language coaches and focused on his costumes for The Day of the Jackal. “There’s a celebration in this character of performance,” Redmayne says of his character as a spy assassin and a consummate professional.
That said, the first season finale does reveal that the titular assassin has yet to be paid for his spectacular take-down of his target, a genius tech billionaire (played by Khalid Abdalla). “For someone so ruthless and accomplished, he’s not quite so good at his accounting,” Redmayne points out, which leaves a clue for how an upcoming season two script for The Day of the Jackal might turn out.
“It’s a big question, how much the money means to him. I think it’s more about disrespect, isn’t it? There’s an addict quality to the Jackal, an addiction to what he does,” he adds.
Another open question raised by the two-episode ending is just how much the Jackal loves his wife (played by Úrsula Corberó), who runs away at the end of the first season after learning her husband in real life is a cold-blooded killer.
Seeking out where his wife has gone would play up the soap opera textures of the Peacock and Spy original that has been otherwise focused on James Bond-like spycraft. Recalling the just-concluded first season, Redmayne explained that, after a harrowing tour of duty as a sniper in Afghanistan, the Jackal had committed to live a life off the grid as a solo assassin.
“Of course, his Achilles heel was meeting this woman, and having the arrogance to believe he could juggle these two things” as an elusive hitman and a family man in Cadiz, Spain, he says. The Day of the Jackal drew Redmayne back to TV after a decade away doing movies, and he says that performing the lead role and executive producing the series took a toll on him.
“Certainly, being both an actor in it and a producer on it, I had a year and a half’s worth of an all-consuming commitment,” he says. That’s left Redmayne impressed with other actors he name-checked, like Nicole Kidman and Reese Witherspoon who juggle both starring and producer roles on their projects.
The series from Carnival Films was acquired by Sky Studios for the U.K. and much of Europe, while Peacock took the spy thriller for the U.S. market. What did excite Redmayne was starring in a globe-trotting TV drama with glamorous backdrops like London, New York, Germany, Spain and Afghanistan — even if many of the scenes were actually shot in Croatia, Hungary and Austria — allowing the audience the joys of armchair tourism.
“It made the logistics incredibly complex, particularly when you’re filming with four different directors and jumping between blocks and trying to keep the character centered and detailed. It was definitely a needle that needed threading, but part of the challenge,” he says.
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The Day of the Jackal is now streaming all episodes on Peacock.
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