THE DAY OF THE JACKAL - EDDIE REDMAYNE INTERVIEW (2024)

Bonnie how are you doing? How's Toronto? Oh my god. I mean you can't you can't tell me that when I've just finished sort of six months of it and my body's broken. Give it a couple of years. Um I mean they all scare me Bonnie to be honest uh but I've realized with me that that is quite a galvanizing um force. This was the the original movie of The Day of the Jackal was one of my favorite films growing up. It was it was one of those battered VHSs in my family that we all watched on repeat and and I don't know what it was about it but I found it so compelling this idea of a kind of chameleon actor assassin and um now so when these scripts arrived in my inbox there's obviously great trepidation because you don't want to butcher your these things you hold in such high esteem but what I read was something that was so contemporary and yet retained all of those kind of old school qualities of of the original that I had so kind of warmed to that I thought it was the sort of television that I would love to watch and so I was kind of compelled to do it and and came on as a producer to help guide it into the world in in a way that um kind of married with my instincts I suppose. And and it is so compelling I was you know I've watched the first few episodes and I've been on the edge of my couch and I have to say how refreshing for you to be able to take a guy like this and flesh him out over 10 episodes as opposed to just doing a film where it's a two hour film you know can you talk about that and having that kind of freedom with this guy? Yeah I mean one of the again the reasons that it appealed to me so much was that when you watch the 1970s movie um for those um who haven't seen it Edward Fox plays the jackal and he is so charismatic but so enigmatic that you you don't get a sense of what's going on internally and that works beautifully in a two-hour film but obviously you can't sustain that for 10 hours and and what I love about this exploration is you get to see this man who on the one hand is a ferocious talented and sort of casually ruthless assassin but is also trying to marry that with being a dad and a loving husband and and of course those things are uh complex to to meld and yet he's somehow believes or has the arrogance to believe that he can um I love television I love when I fall in love with characters I love getting to sit with them for hours on end and when I read the first three episodes of this I thought god this is a character which I could really get my teeth into along with all of the kind of you know the mimicry the disguises the the the sort of old school um spy craft which was the stuff that I used to love in in kind of movies from the 70s um it was great to be able to pull so many times which disguise or which you know personality and as the jackal maybe challenged you the most or just you went okay this is gonna be a fun one to try to do well I don't want to give away too many spoilers for those who haven't seen it but the when I read the first episode there's a kind of there's a an acting challenge in those first 25 minutes that the that Ronan the writer had put in in which I had to play a different nationality a different age a totally different physicality um that involved like some quite intense mimicry and physical work and and it's worked so beautifully in the script but felt like this very aggressive challenge as an actor and I I I love that feeling of feeling outside your comfort zone and and being pushed to things I don't speak a word of German so I got to work with a brilliant language coach called Simone who who had to teach me phonetically the kind of music of these lines um but then also you then had to shift your voice down a couple of octaves into you know to to make him 75 years old and a chain smoker and all of that stuff it's play really and and this whole series felt like an actor's playground for me I mean I I adore Lashana I think she's formidable not only as an actor but as a producer and what I love about this series is you have these two characters both of whom are extraordinarily talented passionate meticulous kind of but will stop at nothing and what comes with that is great moral ambiguity and one of the things that appeal to Lashana you know who's worked who played characters in MI6 before and I don't think was particularly keen to come back until she found a character that was knotty and complicated and messy and could show all the spectrum of trying whilst trying to sort of marry that with being a a mother and a and a wife and and I think she enjoyed the kind of spectrum of of qualities in in in Bianca she's also a formidable producer Lashana she has instincts that are not only for the for the words and the work and the cuts but she's also incredibly musical and so things like when we were trying to work out our title sequence it was Lashana who suggested Celeste who is the artist who who sings the opening track and we went out to her and she you know wrote a song for us and um so her she's a polymath and I'm so excited to see what else she goes on to to to produce as well as starring oh thank you thank you lovely to speak to you