How The Day of the Jackal Tossed Back Perfectly to the Classic 1973 Film
Updating the series while honoring the source material was a tenuous balance.
While Peacock’s The Day of the Jackal introduced a new generation to one of the world’s greatest assassins, it’s far from the Jackal’s first onscreen appearance. The story has been tackled a few times, first in Frederick Forsyth’s 1971 novel, then in the 1973 political thriller starring Edward Fox and Michael Lonsdale, directed by Fred Zinnemann.
Two decades later, Bruce Willis and Richard Gere took the characters for a spin in the simply titled The Jackal. And, of course, the characters and situations were modernized and reimagined when The Day of the Jackal hit Peacock late last year (with a second season already on the way).
While making the series the entire team (from series star Eddie Redmayne to the director, camera operators, costume designers, and more) was aware that they couldn’t just remake the classic film but needed to find new ways to approach the story.
How Peacock’s The Day of the Jackal expands original film
One way to push the boundaries of the story was to lean into the fictional nature of the Jackal’s existence. Sure, the Jackal is a fictional character, but it’s more than that. He’s living a fiction even in his own life. The Jackal is a liar and so is everyone else around him, even the law enforcement officials on his tail. Every moment of his existence is a carefully crafted misdirection.
“This is a world where everybody lies about everything all of the time,” Director Brian Kirk told Indie Wire, “and in talking to Eddie we decided that the best way to approach him was as an actor — a man who plays so many roles that it’s impossible to know which one of them is the truth. And also impossible to know whether he could tell you which one of them is the truth. There’s part of him in all of them, and all of them are him.”
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We spoke with Redmayne back in 2024, during the initial launch of the series, about the similarities between his character and his real-life career as an actor.
"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.
Transforming a single film into a 10-episode series leaves plenty of room to explore the space and expand the mythos. While filmmakers couldn’t (and didn’t want to) remake the classic film shot for shot, there are sequences which pay direct homage. Most notably, the famous watermelon scene.
The team put a lot of work into finding the right location, recreating the backdrop, and meticulously choreographing the sequence. It’s a quiet moment but an important one. The Jackal has recently received a new sniper rifle, custom made for his next big job, but it needs to be calibrated. So, he finds a fresh melon, paints a face on it, then finds a quiet spot for some target shooting.
The recreated sequence is about as close to a frame-by-frame recreation as you can get, while still allowing for a little human creativity. It’s the series giving a nod to its predecessor, but it still feels as fresh and as powerful a sequence as it was 50 years ago.
See it for yourself in The Day of the Jackal, streaming now on Peacock.
