The Day of the Jackal is unmissable television

The 1973 political thriller The Day of the Jackal, starring Edward Fox, and its present-day remake, starring Eddie Redmayne, are in many ways siblings in name only. The new television series is not a remake in the strictest sense – more on that later – and they are set in wildly different political landscapes.

But the two productions, separated by an astonishing five decades, have one thing in common: the 1961 Alfa Romeo Giulietta Spider which the story’s eponymous Jackal uses to speed through Europe. The car that featured in the original, now-iconic film makes a guest appearance in the new television series.

Eddie Redmayne stars as the lone assassin in the TV version of The Day of the Jackal.Credit: Marcell Piti/Binge/Foxtel

For the 42-year-old Oscar, BAFTA, Tony and Olivier award-winning Redmayne, who plays “the Jackal” in the new series, that old car came with a few artistic ghosts sitting in the passenger seat. “It definitely evoked something, and for me, it was something pretty romantic because I’d grown up loving the original movie and the Spider is one of the icons of that story,” Redmayne says.

“It was one of my father’s favourite movies, we had this very battered old VHS video copy of it,” Redmayne says. “We watched it consistently. And so when this script arrived in my inbox, there was quite a serious amount of trepidation because you don’t want to butcher the things you savour.”

What won him over, Redmayne says, was that the new series “was told over 10 hours instead of two, and it felt like something completely other, whilst retaining some of that original DNA”. “That manifests itself in the qualities of the character, but also in the details that harken back to the specificity of Fred Zinnemann’s movie.”

Like the original, The Day of the Jackal is the story of the cat-and-mouse pursuit across Europe of a high-level assassin – the so-called “Jackal” – by an intelligence officer who has been tasked with capturing him. Like the original, it is based on the Frederick Forsyth book of the same name.

On the Jackal’s trail: MI6 agent Bianca (Lashana Lynch) and her boss (Chukwudi Iwuji).Credit: Sophie Mutevelian

There are, however, several significant departures. The new story’s setting is present-day Europe. The TV Jackal’s target is a political universe away from the film’s original target, then-French president Charles de Gaulle. And the Jackal’s pursuer, French deputy police commissioner Claude Lebel (Michael Lonsdale) in the original film, is now a British intelligence agent, played by Lashana Lynch.

The new series is produced by Carnival Films, the British company behind the period mega-hit Downton Abbey. The idea of a Jackal remake had been on the cards for some time, as Carnival’s American studio partner, NBC Universal, held the rights to the film in their library.

“My first instinct was, no way, I revere the film too much. It cannot be bettered, so there’s no point even going there,” says Carnival’s executive chairman, producer Gareth Neame. “So, I was quite stubborn for a while about that, thinking I’m just not going to pursue this.”

The Day of the Jackal producer Gareth Neame.

But Neame was tempted by the idea of reformatting the story as a weekly episodic series “and leaning into all the strengths of that,” he says. “We have 10 hours, not a movie, we have multiple instalments, nine cliffhangers, nine twists, hopefully. It’s a totally different dramatic form. And I thought, OK, maybe this is too good to resist.”

Neame also had a very personal reason for not wanting to stuff it up: his grandfather, the producer, director and screenwriter Ronald Neame, had directed the film adaptation of another Forsyth book, The Odessa File, starring Jon Voight. “I would have read The Odessa File probably far too young, and I read The Day of the Jackal, and the movie was always on TV, and I absolutely loved it,” Neame says.

Perhaps the most significant shift from the viewer’s (née reader’s) perspective is that the ethical and moral universe of the Jackal reboot is not as certain as it was five decades ago. In the original, that the Jackal was the villain was clear. Here, Redmayne’s innate charm, and the moral uncertainty of his pursuers, draw that line a little more ambiguously.

“I love that these are the questions you’re wrestling with because [the original film] felt binary, and Michael Lonsdale’s character was very much on the side of good,” Redmayne says. “What [screenwriter] Ronan Bennett has created is these two characters who are two sides of the same coin: meticulous, obsessive, deeply talented, but with very dubious morals.

“And yet structurally, they’re on this kind of one-way collision course with each other,” Redmayne adds. “What I loved about the writing was the challenge of making someone who’s doing these horrific things someone who the audience also feels for? That moral ambiguity was really compelling to me. Do I think he’s good? No. Did I fight for my character? Yes.”

There is more moral ambiguity in Eddie Redmayne’s Jackal than there was in the original film. Credit: Marcell Piti

Lynch, who has starred as Maria Rambeau in the Marvel Cinematic Universe since Captain Marvel in 2019, and played the warrior Izogie in the historical drama The Woman King, says she revels in the moral uncertainty of the Jackal’s world.

“For that espionage world, it is so much more interesting for there to be a very fine line between good and evil and the truth and a lie,” Lynch says. “One of the first conversations we had was around how we utilise lies in this world, and how that helps us, forces us, or encourages us, as audience members, to question our own morals and where we stand.

“With film there’s just not enough time to dig into the trauma of why someone would become a bad person. You just want to celebrate them being a bad person and sit in that,” Lynch adds. “When it’s long-form TV, and you’ve got the time to do so, you learn more about Jackal’s process, and then you should flip-flop every single episode.”

Though comparisons to the world of British super-spy James Bond seem glib – in truth, the worlds of Forsyth’s spy novels are much darker and more challenging than the lighter and flightier world in Ian Fleming’s books – there is something inextricable in Britain’s cultural DNA that knits deeply to the genre.

“It’s so embedded in our culture what James Bond is, but Day of the Jackal was the movie that my family watched on repeat,” says Redmayne. “And I suppose it’s the history, whether it’s assassins, but also MI6, MI5, the Olympics and [Bond actor] Daniel Craig and the Queen. Those two things, espionage and Britain, are woven together.”

The British spy tradition “is more literary, but it’s definitely a British tradition,” says Neame, who in an earlier life as head of independent drama commissioning at the BBC, steered the hit espionage drama Spooks into production. (It lasted for 10 seasons, totalling 86 episodes.)

“Yes, it’s Bond, but it’s also John le Carré, and it’s Graham Greene, and it’s Erskine Childers writing in the Edwardian era,” Neame says. “It’s all the different branches of military intelligence, of which there were about a dozen during World War II. There are only two left now in MI5 and MI6, but there are all those other ones. It is absolutely a part of our culture.

“There is a sort of noble calling about it,” Neame adds. “There’s somehow even something sort of romantic about those Cambridge spies, the biggest traitors that Britain ever knew. It’s a huge part of our cultural history. But here, I think we are trying to do something much darker and dirtier.”

The Day of the Jackal premieres Thursday, November 7, on Binge and Foxtel.

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