Eddie Redmayne Satisfied His ‘White Lotus’ Envy with ‘Day of the Jackal’ (Exclusive)

Eddie Redmayne and Lashana Lynch are dishing on “The Day of the Jackal,” their new series about an elusive assassin who meets his match in a tenacious British intelligence officer.

“Extra’s” Mona Kosar Abdi spoke with Eddie and Lashana about how exciting it was to film on location across Europe.

Lashana noted, “We shot for eight months out of Budapest. That’s where a lot of the set builds were and shot on location in and around Budapest and a little bit in London and Croatia, which doubled as Afghanistan.”

Eddie added, “It’s so part of the DNA of this show, is this globe-trotting Europe as a kind of playground almost, and we got to go to, you know, Vienna, Budapest —as Lashana said — Croatia, the Dalmatian Coast down there was so beautiful, and even London… They got up in a helicopter at four in the morning and shot London as the sun was rising over the Thames, so you see the city emerging in the mist, and even London, I would say, is reframed in a way that we haven’t necessarily seen before.”

Eddie joked it satisfied his “‘White Lotus’ envy,” saying, “When I used to sit and watch ‘White Lotus,’ I’d be like, ‘Why have I never had a job like that? Why do I never get to go to all these exotic climes?’ And so I feel like I manifested ‘The Day of the Jackal’ through a want to, and it was beautiful.”

The series follows up the book and 1973 movie of the same name, and Eddie reflected on giving the story a modern twist.

Eddie reflected on living up to expectations from fans, “Do you know, when I played Stephen Hawking, I was like, ‘This is gonna be the hardest, because this person is gonna watch your performance of him. And then when I did ‘Fantastic Beasts, I was like, ‘This is gonna be the hardest, because the ‘Harry Potter’ movies have been, like, the most successful things ever. I’ve basically realized that’s just kind of par for the course in acting, is each one in some way feels harder.”

Redmayne shared, “I loved the original movie and the book, and I grew up watching the film. My family were obsessed with it, we had this kind of battered old VHS. And I love what the character represented because I love those thrillers. I love the cat-and-mouse element, but I find the kind of theatricality of it riveting. So for me, what I loved about the ‘Jackal’ when I was a kid was the disguises, the fact that in some ways he kind of is an actor.”

He added, “What I like about this series is it’s got the DNA of all that and it’s made by people who have great respect for the Forsyth book and the Fox movie, but it feels, hopefully, of the now. All those elements together were just so compelling to me.”

Eddie and Lashana also revealed the biggest challenges they faced while filming.

Eddie recalled of one of the disguises he had to assume, “I don’t speak any German and I had to play this German character, and so I learned how to say these German words purely by the music of it, learning from someone who spoke it. But he’s also meant to be a 70-year chain smoker.”

Eddie joked that once he put on the look, he sounded like “a sort of chirpy 10-year-old.” He recalled, “So, in a day, I had to find this kind of chain smoker version of the German.”

Lashana’s biggest difficulty was in deciding how much action she wanted to take on.

She shared, “I told myself that I wasn’t gonna do any more stunts for a while after ‘The Woman King’… Your body goes through a lot, it’s so taxing, and mentally you kinda have to go somewhere else if you’re gonna propel yourself into that kind of physical role.”

She said her character Bianca was too “juicy” to pass up, but when it came to the stunts, “I was almost, like, battling with myself about how to approach that, whether to just be like, ‘Fine, whatever, I’ll just do all of them,’ because my body knows how to do all of them. I’ve got the muscle memory.”

Lashana added, “We have this whole industry, the stunt industry, that is incredible and I have so much respect for, who I would like to celebrate here and actually let them do their jobs. So, I had just a bit of a mental battle as to what to give Bianca and seeing her as a real person, and if it was letting down or failing her by not giving her all of the stunts I think she could have had, but at the same time protecting myself.”