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After Fantastic Beasts, Eddie Remayne Finally Gets What He Wants in Day of the Jackal: Normal Clothes
Eddie Redmayne made a career wearing ruffles, now he gets to wear t-shirts like the rest of us.
Like most actors, Eddie Redmayne got his start on stage and screen years before he became the subject of water cooler talk and tabloid magazines. His first professional credit was in the stage play The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? and he was nominated for an Olivier Award for the performance. Later, he co-starred in Red opposite Alfred Molina, which transferred to Broadway and earned Redmayne a Tony for Best Featured Actor in a Play.
Since then, he's played everything from theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything (for which he won the Best Actor Oscar), to wicked extraterrestrial warlord Balem Abrasa in Jupiter Ascending, to magical menagerie manager Newt Scamander in the Fantastic Beasts film series.
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Redmayne’s credits cross genres from fantasy and science fiction to horror and drama, hitting everything in between. He gravitates, intentionally or not, toward genre fiction or period pieces, but if there’s a throughline in Redmayne’s career, it’s costumes. In Peacock's upcoming assassin thriller The Day of the Jackal those costumes are at least a little more modern.
The Day of the Jackal Finally Lets Eddie Redmayne Wear “Normal Clothes”
“For me it’s about costumes. Basically, this is the first time in almost ever that I’ve got to just wear present day costumes,” Redmayne told NBC Insider.
His early credits were largely period pieces. Redmayne brought to life various historical figures (both real and fictional) in projects like the TV miniseries Elizabeth I, Elizabeth: The Golden Age, The Other Boleyn Girl, and Black Death. In 2012, he played the fictional Marius Pontmercy in the big screen adaptation of Les Misérables.
Now that he’s playing an anonymous professional assassin in Peacock’s The Day of the Jackal, Redmayne is still wearing costumes – particularly when he’s pasting a fake face on top of his own – but the rest of the time he gets to dress like an ordinary person. That’s the big difference, Redmayne says, between this show and most of the rest throughout his career so far.
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“All the films I’ve done, whether it was Fantastic Beasts, which was set sort of early 20th century with lots of bow ties and things, or Les Mis, are all that sort of period drama,” Redmayne said. In 2022, Redmayne played American serial killer Charles Cullen opposite Jessica Chastain in The Good Nurse, and that cracked the door open. The subject matter was horrific, but the costumes were semi-modern.
“With The Good Nurse I sort of eased into the ‘90s, and this year I got to come up,” Redmayne said. “It just means I have to spend a lot less time putting on my clothes in the morning. That’s the difference between the fantasy world and this one.”
The first five episodes of The Day of the Jackal are now streaming exclusively on Peacock. The remaining five will follow every week until the double-sized finale Thursday, December 12.
