<
Speaking to CBR before the program’s Nov. 14 premiere, Redmayne explained why The Day of the Jackal brought him back to the small screen and how the project compared to his movie credits. He also dished on his proudest — and seemingly impossible — accomplishments across the 10 episodes. And what did his acclaimed theatre run in Cabaret have to do with this role?
CBR: The Day of the Jackal is your first scripted TV project in several years. What was it about this remake that interested you, and how was it working in the television medium again?
Eddie Redmayne: I found it thrilling. I found it challenging. I’d not done television for a while, and I signed on to the series having read three episodes, and I found them so propulsive and deeply, deeply compelling. But of course, with television, you don’t necessarily have the whole of it before you start.
And I found that the scale of the thing was as large and cinematic as anything I’d done. I found the length of it — and when you’re shooting in two units side by side, and juggling those things consistently for sort of eight months — globe-trotting in the most glorious way. It was equal parts thrilling, equal parts challenging.
There have been multiple other adaptations of Frederick Forsythe’s 1971 novel, but they’ve all been years ago. Even the Bruce Willis movie The Jackal, which was a very loose version, is over 20 years old. So did you want to consider the lengthy screen history of this character, or did you approach your version of Jackal with a clean slate?
I grew up watching the [1973 Fred] Zinnemann movie. It was one of those VHS that my parents loved, and so it was in my DNA. I’d also read the book. But when I read these scripts, what I loved is they retained what I describe as the sort of obsession with the craft of it.
I love those old ’70s thrillers and films that are that aren’t about computers doing extraordinary things, but are about craftsmanship and the chess-playing element of espionage. And what I loved about the scripts that I read is they retained that DNA, but it felt completely contemporary. It had something of the old school and that elegant refinement and that sort of casual ruthlessness, but it also felt completely contemporary.
You have to make The Jackal a larger than life assassin, or the entire project sort of falls apart on its face. You came to this project not long after your exceptional performance as The Emcee in Cabaret. Did the playing bigger and projecting that comes with a stage role help you in crafting this almost mythic character?
I’d actually done Cabaret in London, and then I went straight into this, and then I came straight off that, and went back into Cabaret in New York. But weirdly, when I was doing Cabaret in London, here’s this weird thing when you’re doing a play, that you get to meet all these extraordinary people that come and see the play. You meet politicians and actors and royalty and all these people come. And I had this idea that, that access of to people that you get, wouldn’t it be interesting to make a television series about a British spy who’s actually a sort of actor in the public eye?
And as I was thinking this through, these scripts arrived on my desk. I feel like I manifested in some way this part, because it fulfilled all of those wishes that I’d had. The Jackal is, in many ways, an actor. He’s changing his personality, his looks, his language, his clothes, every minute and and that makes the
There are some extreme moments later in the series, where he has to compel people to do things that, when I read them on the page, I was like, “There’s no way.” However brilliantly manipulative this guy is, how am I going to thread this needle? How am I going to persuade this character to come from there… while still thinking I’m a decent human being? I found the threading of that basically by being horrifically emotionally manipulative. And when I watch it on screen, it kind of works. [Laughs.] I felt proud of those moments. I’m very proud of my emotional manipulation.
