Eddie Redmayne and Lashana Lynch find themselves on a collision course with disaster in their new spy thriller series The Day of the Jackal, based on Frederick Forsyth’s 1971 historical novel.
Prior to the series’ Peacock premiere on Nov. 14, the Oscar winner opened up to PopCulture.com about his transformation into the chameleonic assassin known as Jackal, as Lynch revealed how her role as 007 impacted her return to MI6 as Bianca.
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To transform himself into Jackal’s many personas, Redmayne worked with his Theory of Everything movement coach, Alexandra Reynolds, and military advisor Paul Bidiss, in addition to a dialect coach and the series’ prosthetics and costume departments.
“What was unique about this is you’re an actor playing an actor,” he told PopCulture. “The Jackal’s capacity to shapeshift, to speak different languages, to speak different dialects … it was like an actor’s playground really.”
It was that kind of character work that drew Redmayne to the project initially. “What I adored about it is – I describe it as being analog rather than digital,” he explained. “It’s about the spy craft. It’s about the disguises. It’s about the pre-planning and the meticulousness of that.”
Despite Lynch’s thought early on that she would be able to use her training as Nomi from 2021’s No Time to Die as “the basis of [her] research” for The Day of the Jackal, she told PopCulture the weaponry work was “a little different” than what she was used to. “Was it?” a shocked Redmayne asked. “Because when I first saw you, you felt so at home in that. I felt like a kid. I felt like you had a total handle on it.”
Lynch admitted she had some “great muscle memory” to lean on, but explained that she wanted Bianca to have her “own flair” and “own style” separate from her 007 character. “No Time to Die‘s MI6 is completely different to our set built here. And this one in particular made me feel so just enriched with ideas and capabilities that I didn’t anticipate that really fed into the story,” she shared. “So I’m glad that they were two separate experiences that can kind of stand on their own.”
After all the preparation that went into Jackal and Bianca, Redmayne and Lynch agreed there’s a humanity to both of their characters they hope will add to the tension underlying the action and espionage.
“What I feel that these scripts had done was create two characters who, hopefully as an audience, you are rooting for, you are compelled by, you’re also astonished by some of their dodgy moral choices,” Redmayne noted. “And yet you know that they’re on a path of collision. And yet you kind of love both of them.”
Day of the Jackal premieres Nov. 14 on Peacock.
