How David Bowie inspired Eddie Redmayne’s ‘Day of the Jackal’ transformations
Eddie Redmayne, who stars as the chameleon assassin in Peacock’s adaptation of The Day of the Jackal, credited his frequent collaborator, Alexandra Reynolds — whom he’s worked with since playing Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything — with tipping him off to David Bowie’s philosophy on costumes.
“She helped me with some of the different characters and the physicality of the different characters in this series,” Redmayne said at a Peacock FYC Q&A at the Lot on Formosa on Monday, noting how early in his career, Bowie appeared in makeup and costumes embodying characters like Ziggy Stardust. “She showed me this interview with David Bowie in the ’70s. It was the first interview he had done dressed as him.”
After going public in a debonair suit, Bowie shared his attitude toward changing his appearance. He did it for his rock star persona. Redmayne’s Jackal uses shifting facades to blend in and get close to his targets.
“Not only were we looking at it for his stillness and his almost deference whilst being completely in charge of the situation,” Redmayne continued. “You were so drawn to him but he’s talking about using clothes as disguise, being away from himself really. That particular video I would play every morning in my trailer and was a big influence.”
The Jackal also wears prosthetic makeup to impersonate people. Behind the scenes, designing that makeup was not as glamorous as Bowie’s transformation.
“One of the more humiliating experiences of my life is standing basically buck naked, having loads of people slap Plaster of Paris on me to make a body cast,” he said.
Costume designer Natalie Humphries helped Redmayne transform. She also took him to Knize’s Viennese tailor shop as an example of expert costumers. Redmayne said he saw the Jackal as a fellow actor — albeit one playing roles for the purpose of killing people.
“The scripts that I first read by Ronan [Bennett] were a celebration in craft, whether that was the makeup, the languages, the physicality,” he said. “The scripts felt like they really dug into that, the idea of this assassin as performer and that was completely intoxicating.”
Perhaps too intoxicating. Now that the series has wrapped, Redmayne longs for the role, despite all the hard work it took to bring it to life.
“I do miss him,” Redmayne said. “I miss that little sociopath.”
In seeing the Jackal as a performer, Redmayne could play each of his personas as a new character. The audience knows the Jackal’s ulterior motives, but what makes him so unstoppable is that he believes it while he’s performing it.
“It made it quite thrilling to play because any circumstance he was in, I would just play it as honestly as possible,” Redmayne said. “The audience is reading something opposite from it but that was definitely one of the appeals.”
Frederick Forsyth’s 1971 novel was first adapted as a movie starring Edward Fox as the Jackal in 1973. The most challenging scene for Redmayne was an homage to the 1973 film, in which the Jackal shoots watermelons as target practice. But the hard part was tying the rope around the tree to mount the gun.
“I spent so long watching Edward Fox’s performance trying to work out how to do it,” he said. “I had a metal pole in my trailer and a rope. I spent about three f--king weeks. So I always admired this particular scene in the original movie. When it came to replicating it, my admiration for Edward Fox went through the roof.”
The Day of the Jackal is now streaming on Peacock.