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Eddie Redmayne has played everything from a wizard, a painter and theoretical physicist to a serial killer. Now, new thriller series The Day of the Jackal is set to see the actor play an assassin for the very first time – and, well, he couldn't have had a better time portraying the chameleonic, disguise-donning character.
"I loved it," he tells GamesRadar+. "It was a playground for me. One of the things I think is kind of intriguing about him as a character is [that] he starts off so enigmatic, but all these different protagonists that he meets along the way mirror or expose different qualities in him.
"But the fact that you've got to not only play him and try and find a through-line through him, but to play his characters as well was an actor's dream. All of that stuff you think of when you're a kid and you want to be an actor – like makeup, prosthetics, different costumes, languages, accents – was just so joyful."
A modernized take on Frederick Forsyth's 1971 novel of the same name, the globe-trotting 10-part series follows Redmayne's high-stakes hitman Charles – or at least that's what he says his name is – as he's tasked with killing a controversial political figure. (In the book, 'The Jackal' takes aim at former French president Charles De Gaulle, who died in 1970. In the show, his target is strictly fictitious).
There are two big problems, though. One is that his wife Nuria (Money Heist's Úrsula Corberó) has grown suspicious of all the time he spends away from home, and has started looking into what he really does. The other? Charles' last successful job – which saw him fatally shoot someone from over two miles away – has caught the attention of Bianca (Lashana Lynch), a tenacious gun expert working for MI6. With the walls closing in on him in every direction, will Charles complete his 100 million-dollar mission?
"I think one of the things that differentiates him from some of the other, you know, famous spies is his 'peacockiness'," Redmayne explains, as he praises the show's "meticulous" costume department. "He's a sort of a flâneur, dandy assassin, and, and it was really important for Natalie Humphries, our brilliant costume designer, that each time you see him he's wearing something different, that he's always changing. That was fun to lean into."
While Lynch has played a spy before, in No Time to Die, Daniel Craig's last outing as James Bond, she found herself having to do a lot of homework prior to filming.
"The whole first week, I just called it MI6 week. It was monologue after monologue; there was so much detail! It was a lot to get my head around, but it also really set me up for the kind of Bianca that I needed to portray," the Marvel star recalls. "I had to learn [all of that gun jargon] on the job. Her expertise and approach is a little frantic and annoying and strange, and a little warped too. But she's also very cocky, so I had to force myself to lean into some kind of cockiness, even though I felt like I didn't know what I was talking about any of the time."
The Day of the Jackal releases on Peacock in the US and Sky Atlantic/NOW in the UK on November 7. For more, check out our picks of the best new TV shows heading our way.
