Eddie Redmayne on reinventing cinema’s most famous assassin

More than 50 years since The Day of the Jackal lit up the silver screen, it’s back as a slick TV show – but it’s more than just a remake

It’s a very hard act to follow. Fred Zinnemann’s original film of The Day of the Jackal, from 1973, was such a bold and definitive classic that director Steven Soderbergh apparently said he could happily watch it once a month for the rest of his life. Despite being made over 50 years ago, the film is still a standard bearer today – in style, momentum, wit, visuals and plot.
Zinnemann was so gripped by the manuscript of the novel by former foreign correspondent and thriller writer Frederick Forsyth, that he stayed up all night reading it. It tells the story of a contract killer (Edward Fox) who attempts to assassinate General de Gaulle, commissioned by a far-right paramilitary group. He is pursued by an eccentric French policeman, Claude Lebel, brilliantly portrayed by Michael Lonsdale.
The film was not an obvious crowd pleaser: it didn’t do particularly well on its release, and was only nominated for one Oscar, but it was critically lauded, and stands up extremely well.
Since then, there has been one (miserable) attempt at a remake: the 1997 film Jackal, an action thriller starring Bruce Willis. But now there is a terrific new 10-part Sky series, written by Ronan Bennett (author, screenwriter and creator of the television series Top Boy) and directed by Brian Kirk, starring Eddie Redmayne and Lashana Lynch. It’s not a remake, its creators are keen to stress.
De Gaulle is long gone, obviously, and it is set in the present day. But the Jackal remains a contract killer – albeit a versatile one who specialises in prosthetics – and Bianca, played by Lynch, is his MI6 pursuer, who struggles with the decisions she has to make.
“In Ronan’s view there’s good and bad in everyone,” says producer Chris Hall, and it is notable that, as in real life, the villain has a lot of good points and the hero many flaws. One of the original film’s crowning achievements was that despite the Jackal’s ruthlessness, you were rooting for him, at the same time as enjoying Lebel’s attempts to catch him.
So who could play the Jackal? Back in the early ’70s, Fox was cast despite many stars auditioning for the role, including Robert Redford and Jack Nicholson. The fact that Fox was largely unknown suited the elusive nature of the Jackal’s character, and he was picked, so the story goes, after Zinnemann watched Fox’s earlier film The Go-Between, in which he delivers the line ‘Nothing is ever a lady’s fault’. It took six months for him to convince American co-producers to go with an unknown lead.
Eddie Redmayne’s casting has a parallel air. Redmayne, 42, is clearly a big star (The Theory of Everything, Fantastic Beasts, Cabaret on stage) but any international project of this scope and budget would have ruled out having an unknown lead from the start.
“The way I remember it,” says Bennett, “is that Eddie didn’t pop into people’s minds at once – there were other thoughts. We were a bit stuck wondering who could do this, then over the weekend I watched The Good Nurse. I had only ever really seen Eddie in softer parts, but here he had a character that was consistent with Jackal’s character.
“Sort of spooky and with an ability to live a double life – to appear to be one thing when really you’re completely the opposite. So on Monday morning I called everyone and said, watch this film.”
They had their Jackal.
So here we are, in Budapest, in January this year. The team are nearing the end of the eight-month shoot and Budapest is standing in for Tallinn, as denoted by the Estonian flag fluttering above the building and the Estonian police car parked nearby. On the other side of town, it is standing in for Munich, and earlier it had doubled for Berlin, Paris and Vienna. It’s a versatile city. (It also offers some very rewarding tax breaks for filmmakers, and 85 per cent of the crew are local.)
We are at Müpa, also known as Palace of the Arts, a huge concert hall and cultural centre in whose eaves the elusive Jackal is preparing to conceal himself ahead of his latest assassination. On set, people are standing around with massive cameras or swigging from cans of an energy drink called Hell.
We congregate at the top of a staircase, waiting for Redmayne to walk up the stairs wearing a black surgical boot in which is concealed his weapon, and pick the lock of a door labelled Staff Only. He does this a few times – after fumbling with the lock picker – then comes over to watch the scene on the monitor, apologising for the fact that instead of all the action scenes I have been told about, I am spending the afternoon watching him climb up and down stairs wearing a surgical boot.
Later, Redmayne is in his trailer, looking slick in a black polo neck and smart pointy shoes. He is taller than I imagined and – Jackal-like – quietly charming. He was practically brought up on The Day of the Jackal, he tells me; it was his father’s favourite film.
“So it was always in my consciousness, and when the script arrived I hadn’t seen it for a long time but the memory remains of this very elegant, debonair, cravatted figure – Edward Fox. I had forgotten about the specifics of the plot – de Gaulle and all the politics – but the physicality and Edward’s portrayal of the Jackal was emblazoned in my memory.
“The film is not dated at all, and the subtleties of it are so unlike typical 1973 films. And because it was something that my dad loved so much, I was excited to read Ronan’s take on it.”
Ronan Bennett’s take is crafty and dynamic, with lots of unexpected twists and dark alleys. The basic tenet is contract killer pursued by the law, aided by sophisticated technology and prosthetics, but the protagonists have human stories as well. There are nods to the original – the Alfa Romeo Spider, the memorable sequence of target practice with a watermelon in a string bag, which is replicated shot by shot, and several more subtle ones that only aficionados will spot. (‘We had fun with that,’ says producer Hall.)
The Jackal himself is very self-sufficient, at forgery and mechanics and languages and theft and deception and charm. He is a master of getting the job done and cleaning up afterwards, leaving not a trace of his identity.
There are also notable differences – Redmayne’s Jackal collects carved chess pieces and likes birdwatching – indeed the only mistake he makes is when he accidentally drives into the back of a truck while studying a bird of prey overhead. And, needless to say, he doesn’t have a cigarette hanging out of his mouth for the entire film like Fox did, but he does have many similar characteristics, what Hall calls “that plastic quality – and I say that as a positive”.
Redmayne’s co-star Lashana Lynch, 36, is not new to MI6, having played Nomi in No Time To Die. Her character, Bianca, is young, highly intuitive, but also vulnerable, and trying to maintain a balance at home with her husband and teenage daughter.
“After I read the first three episodes I knew we had to maintain a well-rounded 360 version of this woman who a lot of us could recognise,” says Lynch, bundled up in a puffer jacket against the Hungarian winter.
“She could be nicer, she could play the game more, but that’s not interesting. You want to see how she copes. She makes some dud choices that cause complications in a really wonderful way for TV, but in the end I respected her, and I sympathise with her, even though I didn’t understand her choices.
“I loved getting into her mind, her psychological journey and her emotional journey. No matter what side of the line your character is on, you have to support them.”
As far as research went, Lynch had thought that she could “rest on my experience” after making No Time To Die, “but I quickly realised this was a different kind of human being. She is highly focused, and one of the best agents in MI6, but she is trying to be her best in her homespace as well as her workspace.
“So I get to tell the story of a working woman with a husband and child trying to strike the balance. It feels nice to dismantle that fierce hard edge that MI6 is sometimes portrayed as having. I wanted people to relate to her – I didn’t want her to be this sharp, super witty character. I want people to think, ‘That’s me, I struggled at work yesterday, I’m a hot mess, but I’ll wake up tomorrow and just get on with it.’ That’s Bianca.”
Lynch is not in many scenes with Redmayne, and had not worked with him before. “But I felt like we were on the same page from the beginning. We knew how we wanted the characters to live together but separately within the piece. And he’s been a dream. Honestly a dream.”
In both this and the original, costumes are key. Bianca is from west London, like Lynch herself, and this is reflected in her clothing. “We’re mindful that Lashana operates in two disciplines, in that she has to be able to function in MI6 in tailoring but she also has to function in the field, and have a level of practicality, so her costumes had to traverse those two,” says costume designer Natalie Humphries.
“Early on, the director Brian Kirk said to me, ‘I am sick of seeing females running in heeled boots.’ I’d like her to look all the time that at any minute she could fly out into the field.”
And for Redmayne… well, the Jackal is something of an understated peacock. “I get to wear some incredibly chic clothes,” he grins, “and I adore Natalie’s taste and ideas. She finds the best sunglasses.” There is, he says, an economical elegance to the Jackal that is timeless. “Natalie has retained the specifics in tailoring – how do we bring in the cravat, the polo neck, the high-waisted trousers – and make them true to my version of him but with respect to the original.”
Redmayne is beginning to wish he’d had it written into his contract that he could keep the clothes. “Yeah I’ve heard of some actors who do that but I’ve never had the need before: I’m usually in tweeds or 19th-century stuff, until The Good Nurse, and I didn’t really want to keep the scrubs. But in this film there is not a single item of clothing that I wouldn’t want in my wardrobe.”
There have been a lot of challenges, not least because where the original Jackal was a master of disguise, relying on wigs and hair dye and glasses, Redmayne’s version is a trained master of prosthetics. He’s a shapeshifter. This is another challenge for Humphries.
“At the beginning of the series he has a complete face of prosthetics – he is totally unrecognisable, so before we even started costuming him, we have to imagine what the body of that man would look like, who that man was – so we did a full body caste of Eddie, and had a movement coach, the whole hog.”
“With these things, collaboration is so important,” says Redmayne, “particularly when you’re creating these characters – there has to be great intimacy between me, the directors, the costume and make-up department, all working in tandem, because you can have an extraordinary prosthetic which is completely undermined by a costume, or the other way round.”
Both he and Lynch are co-executive producers, as is Bennett, which gives them a lot of influence. ‘It’s really taught me how imperative it is to make collective decisions and be cohesive as a production,” says Lynch, who later tells me she has now learnt that she’s a producer at heart, and cannot wait to do more.
Redmayne says it’s been one of the most intense experiences of filming he’s ever had. Not least because 10 episodes of television means eight months of shooting, and months of preparation beforehand. “I’ve never worked harder – it’s often six-day weeks and then you’re working on scripts and the edits at the weekend, and prep testing prosthetics – it’s been a year of tunnel vision. So I hope it’s good.”
“And we’ve been working out multiple times a week,” says Lynch. “I’ve done that for previous projects, No Time To Die and Marvel – but this was eight months, so my body is tired.”
Redmayne also had to learn languages with a dialect coach, and had sniper training, under the tutelage of Paul Biddiss, an ex-soldier who was military advisor on the shoot. The Jackal is incredibly ingenious, especially with his weapons. His portable suitcase deconstructs into this ‘quite staggering rifle’. The (fake) rifle was made to be able to get through airport security, though Redmayne has not tested that himself and rejects my offer to try it out on Wizz Air the following day.
Once the rifle was built, he learnt how to construct and deconstruct it – but to do that with any kind of conviction takes work. Redmayne was staying in a hotel in Budapest at the time, and took it there to practise. “But as I arrived at the hotel, there was a massive protest going on and hundreds of police so my car couldn’t get close. I had to get out and walk past the police with a case that basically contained a sniper rifle.”
He had hoped that with all the mêlée, he could just sneak past. ‘It was a student protest and suddenly one of them recognised me and got excited and said, “It’s Eddie Redmayne! Can we do a selfie?” Then the police noticed and all the photographers stopped taking photos of the protest and started photographing me instead and I was genuinely horrified.’
He made it into the hotel, and spent a while constructing the rifle, then went down to dinner. ‘Then I realised, uh oh, I need to go back and take it apart – because whoever comes in to do the turn-down service was going to find this massive f–k-off sniper rifle sitting on the bed.’
He also had to practise surveillance – which he did in central London. “Paul Biddiss had planted various people round Covent Garden and I had to track them surreptitiously – I was wearing a cap and getting messages on my phone and it was all going quite well until, again, someone stopped me for a selfie, which slightly undermined the process.
“I learnt all these interesting techniques about using shop windows and car mirrors as you’re walking along, and if you’re being pursued, to make sure you always have coins in your hand in your pocket in order to thrust into someone’s face.
“And it turns out,” he adds cheerfully, “that a phone is quite helpful if someone’s trying to mug you – you literally use the blunt end to the throat, which would probably kill them.’ Pause. ‘Or you might as well just give them your phone.”
The key ingredient – the Jackal’s enigma – is not something that can be learnt. “The Jackal doesn’t have a lot of words in the original film, it’s all to do with feeling,” Edward Fox told The New European last year.
“I always thought the feeling of the man was the important thing. I don’t know how you do that, you just think about it an awful lot.”
“Edward Fox plays a very enigmatic character,” says Bennett. “You never see him at home – he’s a man of mystery. That can work over two hours of film but it won’t work over 10 hours of television, it’s just not feasible. So I thought, how can I retain the aura of mystery but at the same time give him a life that is consistent with his day job, which provides him with the opportunity to do what he does but also fleshes out the character a bit more?”
I’m not allowed to go into the solution they found for this, but it’s a good one and it involves the beautiful Spanish actor Ursula Corberó.
“There are so many parts of this kind,” says Redmayne, “whether it’s Bond or Bourne or Killing Eve, that before accepting the role, I have to think about what makes this different. And for me there is a beautiful analogue quality, a classical aspect to the character.
“In Edward’s portrayal of the Jackal, he is this force of charisma but you never get to learn anything about him – 10 hours allows more insight into the psychology of the characters and their unerring passion for their work. What Ronan has tried to do is to marry that with a sense of who he is.
“What I love about what Ronan and his team of writers have done is that these two people – Bianca and the Jackal – are completely determined and focused but they are anti-heroes, in the sense that some of their behaviours are consistently questionable. And yet, hopefully, if we get it right, you’re still rooting for both of them.
“What was interesting for me was plotting the makeup of the character; he starts opaque and gradually you sort of unpick him,” adds Redmayne. “The balancing act of this, which is so successful in the film, is that this person is doing horrendous things and yet you are with him, willing him to live.”
But, he adds, his young son (born in 2018, one of his two children with wife Hannah Bagshawe) just wants him to play a hero. “My last film was The Good Nurse, and for ages my children thought that’s what I was – a good nurse, and then they found out I was perhaps the biggest serial killer in history. To begin with, my son was quite excited about this project, because he’s very much into the army and the military, but now he realises I’m a baddie, and he says, ‘Daddy can you please just play someone good?’”
Months later, I speak to Ronan Bennett on the phone and ask him what has been the best bit of this mammoth production. Seeing the finished cut of the first episode, he says. “When you approach something that has such a reputation – both the book and the film – naturally you’re nervous. I’ve turned down remakes in the past because I haven’t felt I could make them better. I’m not saying I’ve made this better, but I think I’ve done justice to the DNA of the original.
“When I saw the cut of episode one – directed by Brian Kirk, who is a friend of mine – I was so relieved. I could see how good it is.” (He’s right. It is.) “You don’t always get that; you can have all the right ingredients – great cast, great director, great script – but it can still turn out pretty mediocre, the cake doesn’t rise, or whatever the expression is. But I knew straight away how good this was, and I say that in all modesty.”
We are speaking a few weeks after the attempt to assassinate Donald Trump in Pennsylvania. (At the end of the original film, Fox’s Jackal only misses because de Gaulle dips his head at the last minute.) “I woke up to the news on the radio,” says Bennett, “and it seemed a lot easier than what the Jackal has to go through. The young man in Pennsylvania wasn’t even a good shot – he wasn’t a trained sniper or anything, but he was still able to come within a centimetre of killing a presidential candidate. So yes, I think we have elevated the art of assassination.”
The Day of the Jackal is on Sky and streaming service NOW from 7 November
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