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The Day of the Jackal's Eddie Redmayne & Lashana Lynch on Why Acting Is a Lot Like Being a Spy
In this line of work, success or failure depends on your ability to sell a character.
Peacock's The Day of the Jackal, starring Eddie Redmayne and Lashana Lynch, takes viewers around the globe, following the world’s deadliest assassin and the small group of people trying to stop him. Redmayne plays the titular assassin, the Jackal, and Lynch plays Bianca, an MI6 (the U.K.’s Secret Intelligence Service) agent hell bent on catching him.
From the first episode, it’s clear that the Jackal is no ordinary assassin. He has extraordinary skill at killing, pulling off a seemingly impossible long-distance sniper shot, but that’s only the first of his skills. He knows several languages, he can craft prosthetics and other disguises, and he lies like you wouldn’t believe.
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Bianca is no slouch, by the way. You won’t see her wearing latex skin or a fake mustache, but she does craft aliases and her lies give even the Jackal a run for his money. No matter what side of the table you’re on in this line of work, you succeed or fail, you live or die, based on your ability to sell a character and control the narrative. In some ways, being an assassin or an MI6 agent isn’t all that different from being an actor. Don’t take our word for it, hear it from Lynch and Redmayne themselves in the video above.
How acting prepared Eddie Redmayne and Lashana Lynch to play an assassin and a spy in Peacock's The Day of the Jackal
"One of the appeals for me of this part is you're an actor playing an actor. The thing that differentiates the Jackal from many of the other spies or assassins in the genre is he's an artist in some ways. He's learning languages, he is sculpting prosthetics, he is mimicking and fully investing in a way that is exactly what we do,” Redmayne told NBC Insider.
“There is a nice crossover between being an actor and adopting different personalities and lifestyles and things,” Lynch said. As the story progresses, those personalities and lifestyles start to stack up, break apart, and bleed together. The lies start catching up with them until even the characters aren’t sure what’s real. “I do think there’s a question mark over both of these characters,” Lynch added, “that makes you wonder if they even know who the real person is.”
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Bianca’s lies are ostensibly noble. They are designed to keep her and her family safe, and they let her do her job more effectively. But it would be wrong to imply that she doesn’t enjoy it. “She knows how to play the act really well and it’s helped her to get to where she is in her career,” Lynch said. “I think her most favorite act is the art of lying and how to utilize that in the best possible way to bag the bad guy.”
Speaking of that bad guy, Redmayne had an unusual experience of finding his way to the character of the Jackal. Usually, when preparing for a part, you only have to figure out how to be one person. The Jackal, however, is a man of many faces and the face which is most difficult to see clearly is the real one.
“What was interesting when I took on this part, normally I kind of reach out for parts, in the sense that that’s the character and you’re pushing yourself toward them. Whilst that’s certainly true in some of the characters the Jackal plays, what I found most interesting for me as an exercise was, ‘Okay, if I was this guy, if these were my conundrums and these were my obsessions, how would I make my way through the world?’,” Redmayne said. “So, weirdly, it was about bringing the character closer to me.”
The first five episodes of The Day of the Jackal are now streaming exclusively on Peacock. The remaining five will follow every Thursday until the double-sized finale December 12.
