With the slick, stylish new thriller The Day of the Jackal hitting Kiwi screens in on November 15, Eddie Redmayne and Lashana Lynch talk to George Fenwick about the muddy morality of the show’s on-screen murders and manhunts.
The first time we see Eddie Redmayne as the titular assassin in The Day of the Jackal, it’s in the mirror world. Immediately after killing several people while disguised as an old man, Jackal gradually peels back his fake hair and prosthetics over a bathroom sink, and in one fluid take, the camera steadily creeps through the glass as he washes his face, dries himself and walks away.
For Redmayne, the introduction to this character – which evokes Vincent Cassel’s iconic mirror shot in La Haine – is about establishing Jackal’s disconnect with his own identity. “He’s good at shapeshifting into all these different people, but does that leave a vacuum?” says the Oscar-winner, speaking to the Herald in London. “What I love about that opening shot is it was technically really complex – there was actually a body double there standing at the front, and when he relieves himself in the mirror, we had to both go down at the same time, because the camera travels through a mirror which isn’t actually a mirror.
“I’m not sure as an audience whether you even question the weirdness of that, but it maybe just slightly discombobulates your head, that feeling of, ‘Is what I’m seeing real? Or is this another evocation of a different kind of character?’”
The murkiness of the assassin’s true nature was part of how The Day of the Jackal, based on Frederick Forsyth’s 1971 novel of the same name, was modernised for this new 10-part series, premiering on TVNZ+ on 15 November. Opening with Jackal’s killing of a far-right German politician, the show darts across Europe as Jackal struggles to control the fallout of the assassination, and a relentless MI6 agent named Bianca (Bafta-winner Lashana Lynch) tries to hunt him down.
In the 51 years since the first Day of the Jackal film starring Edward Fox, audience demand for espionage stories has not changed, but the world certainly has – and Redmayne and Lynch, who were also executive producers for the show, felt there was a need to blur the clear-cut presentation of heroes and villains in the original.
“In the original book and film, it felt like there was such a binary sense of good and evil. The [Charles] de Gaulle character was good, and the Jackal was very charismatic, but pretty ruthless and cold,” says Redmayne.
“I feel that’s what Ronan [Bennett, screenwriter whose credits include Netflix’s Top Boy] has done updating it now. There is much more of a spectrum of morality, and both characters are, in some ways, two sides of the same coin; they’re meticulous, obsessive, talented and deeply morally dubious – even though one is probably better than the other. That felt of the present.”
When the audience first meets Bianca, she’s deep in the bowels of MI6 inspecting a confiscated gun. The metal grill door frames her like prison bars, hinting at a determined character stifled by her bureaucratic workplace. Though quick-witted and unstoppable in her pursuit of Jackal, Lynch wanted the character to break away from previous depictions of female spies as portraits of perfectionism.
“When I read the first three episodes, I saw someone who is really calm on the surface, but very erratic underneath,” Lynch says. “I don’t quite know if she knows who she is.”
“To tell a female narrative that isn’t slick and polished, she doesn’t have the answers all the time, but she grapples enough of herself in order to present as someone who does, is an important combination for me as a female actor to portray, because I just don’t see it in this space.”
As Jackal and Bianca’s cat-and-mouse game intensifies each episode, the series layers the tension exponentially – but despite the breakneck pace of the story, Redmayne tried to keep his performance as still as possible.
“The thing I had to work most hard at was slowing myself down,” he says. “I had this idea that I wrote on the first script, that he’s like a knife through butter. He’s so economical, he’s so elegant, and it’s chaos around him.”
“There are moments when he’s driving towards the end and the story has blown up into chaos and frenzy, and my note was that the sound of the speed and the ferocity of the car had to be 10 times as loud, because his calmness needs to be in direct juxtaposition with the frenzy around him. Weirdly, I’m not a particularly mellow or still person, so it was about the editing and the music and the people around me being ferocious in order that he could have a stillness.”
That frenzy keeps the action hopping between locations such as Cadiz, Munich, Belfast and London, lending the series an expansive, escapist pleasure that evokes classic spy stories of the 20th century – and which was one of Redmayne and Lynch’s priorities as producers.
“I love television where I can sit on my sofa with the pouring rain outside in the middle of November here in the UK, and be transported to places that I dream of – I loved White Lotus for that, and I’ve never been able to do one of those,” he laughs.
“But it’s also part of the appeal of the original movie as well, and we were lucky that we got to go to these extraordinary places, and that’s also the glamour of it.”
The Day of the Jackal airs in New Zealand on TVNZ+ from November 15.
The Hollywood star is 70 but has no plans to retire from acting.