Sharp shooter
DQ heads to Budapest to meet Eddie Redmayne, Lashana Lynch and the team behind Sky and Peacock’s globe-trotting action thriller The Day of the Jackal, a very modern update on the classic tale of an elusive assassin and the spy out to get him.
It may be the slickest, coolest, spy show of the year, but most of The Day of the Jackal was filmed in a former poultry packing factory on the outskirts of Budapest.
The factory has been repurposed by Downton Abbey producer Carnival Films and now houses, among other sets, a reimagined MI6 office and a curved LED stage on which Eddie Redmayne sits driving a car and seemingly becoming more and more furious with whoever he is on the phone to.
It’s all part of the job, of course. As the famous hitman The Jackal, Redmayne has, it seems, been let down by some acquaintances. And he’s not a man you want to make an enemy of. Within the first few minutes of the show, we see his first hit – a politician who he kills with pinpoint accuracy from two miles away.
Redmayne himself is a pussycat. When he comes into a side room to chat to DQ in the Hungarian capital, he talks about the thrill of returning to television for the first time in more than a decade and also, finally, getting to play a very modern character.
“The real career move here is playing someone who lives in the 21st century,” jokes the star, who won an Oscar for his heart-breaking performance as Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything. “I’ve spent most of my career dressed in tweed, or Elizabethan or Victorian outfits. With Fantastic Beasts I was in the 20th century, and now I have finally arrived in the 21st.”
Although inspired by Frederick Forsyth’s ever-popular first novel, and the cult 1973 Zinnemann film (no one talks of the Bruce Willis version), this The Day of the Jackal is a very different beast. Told over 10 episodes and set in the present day – so no Charles de Gaulle – we also meet The Jackal’s wife, Nuria (Úrsula Corberó), while the officer pursuing him is an MI5 agent played by James Bond star Lashana Lynch.
“When someone in my office mentioned remaking The Day of the Jackal, my first response was, ‘I could never do that,’” admits Carnival’s Gareth Neame. “I love the movie and didn’t want to touch something so beloved. But the idea didn’t go away – we kept talking. It is such a great property and one we had access to because the original movie was made by Universal and we are part of their family [within NBCUniversal’s Universal International Studios]. Slowly, I got over my concerns.
“One of the first discussions was about making it contemporary. And because we have 10 hours, rather than what was quite a zippy movie, it meant we had space for a lot more storytelling, which gave the whole thing a different dimension. What it has in common with the film is that there is an English assassin who has been tasked to do a high-level hit in Europe and the efforts of law enforcement to get to him before that happens.
“We are aware that the majority of our audience won’t know the film or the book, but for those who are fans of the originals, we’ve given some little rewards, reminders. And although it is set in the present day, we’ve given it a style so that you are conscious of the films of the 1970s.”
Redmayne was also a huge fan of the film, and that’s partly what drew him to the role. “This script arrived and I read it with some trepidation,” he says. “I had loved the Forsyth book and the film was one of my father’s favourites, so I grew up watching it – it is an iconic movie.
“My concern was that it didn’t butcher one of my favourite things, but what I liked was it took the DNA and essence of Forsyth’s novel and the film and transported it into the current climate, both politically and technologically. Yet it was still rooted in the analogue world. One of the things that defines The Jackal for me is that there’s a certain old-school quality to him; an elegance, a refinedness. He’s a throwback to those beautiful spy movies that were about spycraft and espionage and contraptions, chess playing.
“I also liked the challenge of the script. This character has to pass as German, he has to pass as French, he has to speak Spanish. In the movie, his transformations were putting a bit of grey in his hair, but here we are playing with the idea of what they do in espionage now: full prosthetic transformations. So I saw the character as an actor. It was a good job I was given a three-month period to prepare all that.”
Preparation included working with German, French and Spanish dialect coaches. “I can now speak very specific words in those languages,” the actor jokes. “But I also had to take on these characters. One is a 65-year-old chain-smoking German, so I had to take my voice to a different register.”
To create the brilliant prosthetics, 3D scans were made of Redmayne’s face and then plastic masks were carefully sculpted on top. “I look quite different,” he says. “And when I was being made up as the German, that was the day my children came to set – so I now may have years of therapy to pay for!
“They arrived when I was still in costume and they recognised my voice. My daughter watched it all come off and my son was sort of pulling at the ears and I was thinking, ‘This is a really bad idea, awful parenting.’ They also don’t like me playing baddies. When I was in a film called The Good Nurse, they were upset that I wasn’t a good nurse and now they’re a bit upset that I am not the goodie in this.”
Redmayne also has to do a fair amount of action in the series – and he’s hoping all of it makes the cut. “There was a scene in which I had to jump onto a horse. I spent months training for it and then I saw a cut of the scene and saw they’d taken it out – I want them to put it back in.”
To prepare for the role, Redmayne worked with military advisor Paul Biddiss. “We met up in Covent Garden and he taught me about how these people live – really small things that were riveting about the craft, whether it’s about having a phone in your hand that you can use to go for someone’s neck or having coins that you can use to distract or throw into people’s eyes. He explained how having a high-vis jacket can weirdly allow you to hide in plain site because you can just disappear to places where you couldn’t otherwise go; how you can use shops windows and car mirrors to see if you are being followed.
“He had me go out in Covent Garden. I was sent a WhatsApp of the face of someone I had to find and track, I then had to trace them through Superdrug on the Strand and then as I was following, and trying to remember as much as I could, I got another WhatsApp to tell me I was being pursued. It all went really well until I was stopped for a selfie by someone and had to stop.”
For Lynch, her role as MI6 agent Bianca, who is hunting The Jackal, was in some ways a return to a world she had inhabited before, but this agent is very different from her part in 2021 Bond film No Time to Die.
“The main difference is that you get to live and sit with Bianca for a much longer time,” says the actor. “It is not just because it’s a TV show and we have more time, but also we really get to dive into how her work-life balance affects her mental health, the dynamics between her and her family. She’s a hard-working, hungry agent who doesn’t get to be home much and we see how she struggles with that.
“Typically, we turn working mothers into superwomen but I think that’s highly boring and I was determined that Bianca should stay real. I thought about my mum and how she did multiple jobs, how you have your brain away from home all the time and then get home and have to be as present as possible with your children. I think it will be nice for mums to see how much she is trying to strike a balance. I also wanted to ensure that Bianca is funny. She is stressed and that gives her a dry humour. I think audiences will like to see someone coming out with so much sarcasm.”
Both Lynch and Redmayne are producers on the series, and working behind the scenes together meant they got to know each other, as their characters’ stories are almost always in parallel – with filming being ‘double banked’ with two different teams.
“In order for a set to be run well and powerfully and safely, you need your number one and two on the call sheet to be working together,” Lynch says. “Eddie just happens to be a very beautiful human and had a great vision for the show. We came together in random ways to discuss what we wanted to do to elevate the class and elegance of the show. While we were hardly looking at each other at work, we were always finger-on-the-pulse, making sure the heads of departments were protected and the characters always felt real.
“For me, as someone who played smaller roles, I also wanted to do things like ensure every character had a name, a line, something to do. I have a gripe about flying an actor in for this exciting show and then giving them nothing more than a head nod. That determination from me and Eddie ensured that a character that came in for one episode actually ended up staying for six.”
Sold internationally by NBCUniversal Global TV Distribution into more than 200 countries ahead of its launch, The Day of the Jackal itself takes a nod from the glamour of Bond, and the chase goes across Europe. Most of it, however, was filmed in close proximity to the Budapest unit base, and in Croatia, Vienna and the UK. France, Germany, Estonia, Latvia, Sweden, Belarus, Spain and Afghanistan are all featured in the series, while a Croatian island called Pag filled in for the Middle East.
“We can create almost everything we need in this country,” says Neame of filming in Hungary. “We made Jamestown – about the first English settlers in America here – on the Danube and the lake. We brought 25 Native American actors here every season and we even grew tobacco here. We have our Hungarian crew here and it just works really well.”
With the show debuting on Sky Atlantic and streamer NOW from tomorrow and on US platform Peacock on November 14, it all adds up to a thrilling 10 hours of television made by a team at the top of their game. There are hopes that if the show does well enough, it could return. But in the meantime, it is perhaps just enough to have something exciting and different – even if it is a story which is nearly 50 years old.
“This feels big,” says Redmayne. “The scope and the locations, the glory and indulgence of seeing beautiful parts of the world, and the globetrotting-ness feel fully realised. What I loved about the original movie was that from our living rooms, we got to leap across the world with someone who seems to nip on a train or a plane as he pleases. I hope audiences enjoy going on that ride.”
tagged in: Carnival Films, Eddie Redmayne, Gareth Neame, Lashana Lynch, NBCUniversal Global TV Distribution, Peacock, Sky, The Day of the Jackal