“The more identities a man has,” John Le Carré wrote in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, “the more they express the person they conceal.”
Leave it to the father of the modern spy thriller to articulate one of the central conceits of a new espionage thriller that’s just landed on Peacock — The Day of the Jackal, a 10-episode adaptation of Frederick Forsyth’s 1971 novel of the same name in which a meticulous assassin is hired to kill French president Charles de Gaulle. In Peacock’s updated version of the story, Eddie Redmayne plays the suave and enigmatic Jackal, whose specialties include: Completing kill shots from impossible distances, and shedding his appearance the way a normal person changes sweaters.
This new version of the tale thrusts it into the murky nexus of the dark web, shady financiers, and international politics. Instead of a French politician, the Jackal is hired to take out an unmistakably Muskian tech billionaire. Unchanged is his obsessive dedication to his craft. Track his quarry, elude the British intelligence officer obsessed with catching him, and occasionally drop in on his sexy lover (Úrsula Corberó) who lives on a remote Spanish villa — all in a day’s work for a shape-shifting merchant of death.
“One of the great appeals to me of this character,” Redmayne told me in an interview, “is that he’s an actor.” And a formidable one, at that.
In the opening moments of the series, for example, the Etonian Redmayne has transformed into a stooped, elderly janitor pushing a mop bucket across an office floor. Moments earlier, he’d been standing in front of a mirror refining a German accent, coldly mimicking a voice on a cassette that presumably belonged to the OG janitor. The Jackal mumbles his passable German to make it past the reception. Once inside, things kick off soon enough and he shoots his target in … the leg?
It turns out, the shooting victim wasn’t his intended target but rather the son of his target. The Jackal’s true prey is a populist German politician, who’s now forced to visit his wounded son the next day in the hospital — which the Jackal has in the viewfinder of his high-powered rifle. The trap thus sprung, down falls the sniped German politico as he strides through the hospital’s entrance, his head having exploded in a violently abrupt pink mist. Another clean yet elaborate kill for an assassin whose schemes are as precisely tuned as a Patek Philippe.
“The people that made this series are certainly, from my point of view, great lovers of Frederick Forsyth’s book and huge admirers of the Zinnemann movie,” Redmayne continues to me, referring to the 1973 feature film adaptation of the book by director Fred Zinnemann. “In fact, I had an old VHS cassette of The Day of the Jackal — it was one of those three or four movies that would be watched continuously in my household. So when the email came in with the script, I was very tentative. But also very tantalized.
“And when I saw that it was set now and felt like something completely new and fresh — yet it retained the DNA of the original — I felt like it was far enough from the original to hopefully not be scrutinized for comparison and to live as its own thing.”
Eventually, a cabal of financiers enlists the Jackal’s help in eliminating a repugnant sort of uber-rich narcissist, one who’s earned the ire of the 1 percenters by developing a software program that would make all of the world’s financial transactions, every single one, completely transparent. The rich can’t have that, and so down he must fall. In the meantime, he’ll have a foil hot on his heels trying to thwart his next contract killing — an MI6 officer (Lashana Lynch) who’s every bit as knowledgeable as he is about guns, and just as driven to win.
Two perfect foils, each the other’s match, in a game of cat-and-mouse wherein neither is encumbered by such prosaic matters as collateral damage or the price of victory.
“One of the things that I found intriguing is — normally, when I’m playing a part, I reach out to who the character that I’m playing is,” Redmayne said. “And what I found thrilling about the prospect of playing the Jackal here was — how would I do this? If I am this guy, let’s go and start talking to prosthetics artists and talk about the process. About how it works for them.
“There’d be moments I was working with Richard, our prosthetics artist, and he would bring together this sculpture of my face, and I’d say: Ok, we need that on set. And he’d have these clay tools he uses to sculpt and — we need those on set. To really be able to not just to dig in to the process, which is the part of the job that I love perhaps the most, but also to be able to celebrate that and put that on screen — to make that go from being the recessive part of TV and filmmaking to kind of in the forefront — I really enjoyed that.”
