Eddie Redmayne and Lashana Lynch are already two of the most exciting English actors working, having amassed, in recent years, roles as wonderfully varied as the Emcee in Cabaret , the murderous nurse Charles Cullen, Rita Marley , and a spear-wielding Dahomey warrior between them. Yet in The Day of the Jackal , a 10-part-series now airing on Peacock, both performers are in especially fine and fearsome form. The show sees Redmayne play a sphinxlike assassin—code name: the Jackal—who draws the attention of the Secret Intelligence Service in London after killing a German politician from such a ludicrously long way off that authorities think the reported distance (3,850 meters) is a mistake.
It is not , in fact, and as the Jackal moves on to his next target, a skeevy tech billionaire preparing to launch an app that would make all the world’s financial transactions public, Lynch’s wily Bianca Pullman, a gun wonk with the MI6, is hell-bent on catching him, no matter the cost. (The show’s story is very loosely based on Fred Zinnemann’s 1973 political thriller of the same name, itself adapted from a 1971 novel by Frederick Forsyth.) It’s pulse-quickening stuff, replete with gorgeous locations (Munich! Budapest! Vienna! The Adriatic Sea!), wild car chases, and characters so good at their very dangerous and morally murky jobs, you can’t help but be a little obsessed with them.
To mark The Day of the Jackal ’s release, Vogue caught up with Redmayne—who had recently r.
