DUBAI: “The Day of the Jackal” — a 10-episode series written by Ronan Bennett available to stream in the Middle East on OSN+ — is a contemporary reimagining of Frederick Forsyth’s 1971 novel and the famed 1973 film, directed by Fred Zinnemann.
UK film star Eddie Redmayne plays the titular Jackal, an extremely thorough and detail-oriented British assassin, often taking on intricate disguises and speaking several languages to get the job done.
“One of the thrills of this experience for me was that the Jackal kind of is an actor. And particularly in Ronan’s version of him now, he’s quite obsessive, and he loves the process.
“And so, the fact that he’s an artist, and he preps the prosthetics himself and he mimics the languages … The whole experience was a sort of actor’s playground, really. And I loved that element of it,” Redmayne told Arab News.
“What I found intriguing about the part was, normally, when I’m playing a part, I kind of reach out to the character, and there were many moments in this in which I was going, ‘OK, so if this guy’s an actor, and he’s quite a proficient actor, how would I navigate my way through this situation? If I had these formidable assassin skills, if I had to lie horrifically to my wife, if I had to manipulate things.’
“So, what’s odd is, of all the characters I played, much more so I found it was about trying to bring that character to me, rather than reaching out to him, which was helped by the fact that it’s the first character I played in 25 years in which he wears contemporary clothes. I’ve been stuck in tweeds and stiff collars. So, that was fun,” he said.
Starring alongside Redmayne is Lashana Lynch, who plays Bianca, an intelligence officer with firearms expertise and a similarly obsessive approach to her work.
The thrilling series follows a tense cat-and-mouse chase across Europe, with Bianca hot on the heels of the Jackal, who is leaving a trail of bodies in his wake as he evades authorities.
The show traces an uncanny parallel between the two characters. They both have family lives, they are both exacting and skillful at their jobs, but chaos follows wherever they go, often with deadly consequences.
“For me as an actor, it was exciting to see a man and a woman in those positions. I’m very used to the films that I have come across over the years, seeing two men in those positions, and everyone being very excited that one’s going to oscillate between being good and evil,” Lynch said.
“Having a woman being potentially evil is really exciting because it breaks the parameters in a way that kind of re-educates the industry to continue to stay open minded with female characters, and that’s kind of what I’m all about. And to have a team like this that celebrated that and did it within the genre of espionage is special and very new for the kind of TV that I’m used to watching,” Lynch said.
