Eddie Redmayne is opening up about his physical transformation on screen in his new series The Day of the Jackal!
The 42-year-old stars as a ruthless assassin, the Jackal, who “makes his living carrying out hits for the highest fee. But following his latest kill, he meets his match in a tenacious British intelligence officer (Lashana Lynch) who starts to track down the Jackal in a thrilling cat-and-mouse chase across Europe, leaving destruction in its wake.”
In the series, Eddie uses prosthetics to help disguise himself, with the first episode seeing him as an elderly German cleaner.
During a recent interview, he dished on the transformations and what it was like using the prosthetics.
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“My overwhelming memory of those days was [prosthetics designer Richard Martin] coming and doing pin pricks through the prosthetic and this sweat oozing out the top,” he told Variety about a scene in Ep 1, where he was in hair and makeup for four hours on a hot day.
The actor added that having to act through the layers of prosthetics has certain challeneges.
“You don’t get much time to prep with them, because it costs so much money, and they take so long to put on,” Eddie shared. “And they’re so deeply uncomfortable that people quite often go, ‘Oh, that’s a prosthetic performance.’ But having experienced quite a lot of it myself, when I look at someone like Colin Farrell’s performance [in The Penguin] or Gary Oldman’s performance [in The Darkest Hour], you don’t get much time to prep in it. So it’s really a trial and error experience.”
“You can have a wonderful prosthetic, but if that doesn’t marry with a voice, then you’re screwed,” he explained. “Once you’ve prepped the German-speaking, you’ve then got to drop the pitch of it in order to marry with the fact that this guy is a 70-year-old chain smoker.”
Eddie is also an executive producer on the series, and was able to be involved in other aspects, like deciding to share the prosthetic process on screen by including it in the storyline.
“I wanted an audience to get to see behind the curtain of it, so that moment when the Jackal takes [the prosthetics] off, rather than being unrealistic, it actually takes a good hour,” he said.
The first five episodes of The Day of the Jackal will drop on Peacock on November 14th, with episodes weekly on Thursdays and a double-episode finale (episodes 9 and 10) on December 12th.
