Eddie Redmayne is no stranger to prosthetics, but the variety of disguises he dons as a stone-cold assassin in ‘The Day of the Jackal’ proved to be his most challenging physical transformation yet.
Episode 1 of the series, which dropped on Sky on November 7 in the UK and will reach Peacock in the US on November 14, opens with Redmayne infiltrating the company’s headquarters, disguised as an elderly German cleaner, to find a to eliminate the target.
For that one scene alone, the actor spent four hours in hair and makeup to age and change his face (a process overseen by makeup designer Melanie Lenihan and prosthetics designer Richard Martin) and donned a foam suit to to make his body bigger. . To top it all off, the scene was shot during a sweltering hot day in Hungary and there was no air conditioning in the studio. “My overwhelming memory of that time was Richard coming and doing pinpricks through the prosthetic and sweat oozing out of the top,” Redmayne recalls with a laugh.
The actor, who has appeared in the “Fantastic Beasts” franchise as well as films like “The Theory of Everything” and “The Danish Girl,” says acting through layers of rubber and foam poses specific challenges. “You don’t get a lot of time to prepare them because it costs so much money and it takes so long to put them on,” he says. Variety. “And they’re so deeply uncomfortable that people often say, ‘Oh, that’s a prosthetic version.’ But I have experienced quite a lot of it myself, when I watch the performance of someone like Colin Farrell [in “The Penguin”] or Gary Oldman’s performance [in “The Darkest Hour”]you don’t get much time to prepare for it. So it’s really a matter of trial and error.”
Once the prosthetics are in place, other elements must come together to make the character completely believable. “You can have a beautiful prosthesis, but if it doesn’t match a voice, then you’re screwed,” he explains. The caretaker role required Redmayne to speak German, which he honed with a local dialect coach. “Once you prepare the German language, you have to drop the tone to be able to marry the fact that this guy is a 70-year-old chain smoker,” says Redmayne.
As executive producer of “The Day of the Jackal” (alongside co-star Lashana Lynch), Redmayne was also involved in other aspects of the 10-part series, including production design, which meant he got to share the prosthetic process with viewers. by weaving it into the storyline. “I wanted an audience to be able to see behind the scenes of it, so that moment when the Jackal takes hold [the prosthetics] It’s not unrealistic, but it actually takes a good hour,” he explains. He also borrowed a polystyrene bust that Martin had made of his face to decorate a dressing table in the Jackal’s secret room.
Eddie Redmayne in ‘The Day of the Jackal’ (Courtesy of NBCUniversal/Sky)
Courtesy of Marcell Piti/Carnival Film & Television Limited
Redmayne, who was a fan of the original 1973 feature film adaptation starring Edward Fox, says there was “hesitation” when he was first offered the role of the Jackal until he read the first three episodes. “I found it so damn compulsive,” he says. “I couldn’t stop turning the pages.” While the series, based on Frederick Forsyth’s iconic 1971 novel, has been modernized enough to look and feel contemporary, “it retained the analogue quality of the original,” says Redmayne.
“I love that you see the meticulousness with which he prepares,” the actor says of his character. “You see what his process is. His strategies are built with the details of a Swiss watch. I experience a great catharsis when I see that happen. And then it is also quite exciting when something goes wrong.” Redmayne says he “may or may not share a kind of meticulous and obsessive quality with the character”, which he also brought to his production duties.
On the Jackal’s tail is Bianca, a senior detective focused on capturing the elusive assassin, often at the expense of her personal relationships. While Redmayne is theoretically the villain to Lynch’s goodie, one of the aspects of the story that appealed was that both characters exist in a gray area, with Redmayne in particular making the mercenary Jackal seem sympathetic.
“What I liked about the structure of this new version, instead of it being some kind of binary good and evil, as it felt in the original film and book, now it felt like two sides of the same coin,” he explains . . “It felt like both characters mirrored each other in their obsession, in their ruthlessness, in their talent, but also in their moral ambiguity and blurriness of choices and that felt compelling.”
That moral ambiguity is less prevalent in another character Redmayne is known for: the serious magician-zoologist Newt Scamander in the “Fantastic Beasts” franchise. Redmayne has made three episodes of the ‘Harry Potter’ spin-off, but says there are currently no plans for more. “As far as I’m concerned – no,” he says, politely but firmly avoiding further discussion in a manner reminiscent of the Jackal. “That’s a question for one of us [Warner Bros. Discovery] leaders.”