Courtesy of Peacock/Sky
Eddie Redmayne is no stranger to prosthetics but the variety of disguises he dons as a stone-cold assassin in “The Day of the Jackal” proved to be his most challenging physical transformation yet.
Episode 1 of the series, which landed in the U.K. on Sky on Nov. 7 and is set to hit Peacock in the U.S. on Nov. 14, opens with Redmayne infiltrating corporate headquarters disguised as an elderly German cleaner to take out a target.
For that one scene alone, the actor spent four hours in hair and make-up to age and change his face (a process overseen by make-up designer Melanie Lenihan and prosthetics designer Richard Martin) and donned a foam suit to bulk out his body. To top it off, the scene was shot during a blisteringly hot day in Hungary and there was no air-conditioning in the studio. “My overwhelming memory of those days was Richard coming and doing pin pricks through the prosthetic and this sweat oozing out the top,” Redmayne recalls with a laugh.
The actor, who appeared in the “Fantastic Beasts” franchise as well as films including “The Theory of Everything” and “The Danish Girl,” says that acting through layers of rubber and foam presents specific challenges. “You don’t get much time to prep with them, because it costs so much money, and they take so long to put on,” he tells Variety. “And they’re so deeply uncomfortable that people quite often go, ‘Oh, that’s a prosthetic performance.’ But having experienced quite a lot of it myself, when I look at someone like Colin Farrell’s performance [in “The Penguin”] or Gary Oldman’s performance [in “The Darkest Hour”], you don’t get much time to prep in it. So it’s really a trial and error experience.”
Once the prosthetics are on, other elements then need to come together to make the character fully believable. “You can have a wonderful prosthetic, but if that doesn’t marry with a voice, then you’re screwed,” he explains. The caretaker role required Redmayne to speak German, which he brushed up on with a local dialect coach. “Once you’ve prepped the German-speaking, you’ve then got to drop the pitch of it in order to marry with the fact that this guy is a 70-year-old chain smoker,” says Redmayne.
As an executive producer on “The Day of the Jackal” (alongside co-star Lashana Lynch), Redmayne was also involved in other aspects of the ten-part series, including production design, which meant he got to share the prosthetics process with viewers by weaving it into the storyline. “I wanted an audience to get to see behind the curtain of it, so that moment when the Jackal takes [the prosthetics] off, rather than being unrealistic, it actually takes a good hour,” he explains. He also borrowed a polystyrene bust Martin had made of his face to decorate a dressing table in the Jackal’s secret chamber.
Eddie Redmayne in ‘The Day of the Jackal’ (Courtesy of NBCUniversal/Sky)Courtesy of Marcell Piti/Carnival Film & Television Limited
Redmayne, who was a fan of the original 1973 feature film adaptation starring Edward Fox, says there was “trepidation” when he was first offered the role of the Jackal, until he read the first three episodes. “I found it so damn compulsive,” he says. “I couldn’t stop turning the pages.” While the series, based on Frederick Forsyth’s iconic 1971 novel, has been modernized enough to look and feel contemporary, “it retained the analogue quality of the original,” Redmayne says.
“I love that you see the meticulousness with which he prepares,” the actor says of his character. “You see what his process is. His strategies are constructed with the minutia of a Swiss watch. I find great catharsis in watching that unfold. And then also it’s pretty thrilling when something goes awry.” Redmayne says he “may or may not share a sort of meticulous and obsessive quality with the character,” which he carried into his producing duties as well.
On the Jackal’s tail is Bianca, a senior detective focused on catching the elusive assassin, often at the expense of her personal relationships. While in theory Redmayne is the baddie to Lynch’s goodie, one of the aspects of the story that appealed was that both characters exist in a grey area, with Redmayne in particular making the mercenary Jackal appear sympathetic.
“What I loved about what the structure of this new version was rather than it being sort of binary good and evil, which it felt like in the original movie and the book, now it felt like two sides of the same coin,” he explains. “It felt like both characters mirrored each other in their obsession, in their ruthlessness, in their talent, but also in their moral ambiguity and blurriness of choices and that felt compelling.”
That moral ambiguity is less prevalent in another character Redmayne is known for playing: the earnest magi-zoologist Newt Scamander in the “Fantastic Beasts” franchise. Redmayne has made three instalments of the “Harry Potter” spin-off but says as of now there aren’t plans for more. “As far as I’m concerned – no,” he says, politely but decisively sidestepping further discussion in a manner reminiscent of the Jackal. “That’s a question for one of our [Warner Bros. Discovery] leaders.”
