007 things that make The Day of the Jackal a perfect spy series

The world’s most devious assassin-for-hire – the Jackal (Eddie Redmayne) – meets Britian’s most determined intelligence agent – Bianca Pullman (Lashana Lynch, Bob Marley: One Love) – in this nail-biting, globetrotting action-drama series based on Frederick Forsyth’s 1971 political thriller novel. 

Normally if he got wind of people on his tail, the Jackal would pull a disappearing trick. But the $100 million price tag on his latest target – tech entrepreneur Ulle Dag Charles (Khalid Abdalla) – is too good to pass up. Bianca will never get a better chance to catch the Jackal than now. 

And more than one life is on the line as they try to unmask, outwit and destroy one another. Both the Jackal and Bianca have families and secret identities to protect. So there’s a whole lot of lying to their nearest and dearest like Bianca’s husband Paul (Sule Rimi) and the Jackal’s wife, Nuria (Úrsula Corberó). 

Stream The Day of the Jackal now. New episodes Mondays from 20:30

Here are 7 things that make The Day of the Jackal a great spy saga.

1. A master of disguises

The Jackal has been operating undetected for years thanks to the fact that nobody has a clue of what he really looks like. The Jackal is a one-man show who hones his craft – which is, let’s not forget, killing high-profile people and getting away with it – with meticulous attention to detail. He learns new languages, makes his own prosthetics, bald caps and wigs for disguises (which we see him painstakingly put on and take off), and observes everyone around him so he can mimic their mannerisms and pitch of their voice. 

He can create characters from distinctly different backgrounds so acutely that nobody would look at him twice. Could the assassin be Ralf the crusty old German cleaner with the horseshoe moustache? How about posh British chessboard collector Anthony Mallinson? Maybe he’s flirty gay architect Peter Gibson? Or how about distinguished, older wheelchair user Frederick McCarthy Forsyth (a nod to The Day of the Jackal’s author)? 

In real life, though, it was a team effort rather than a solo performance. Eddie practised physical mimicry with movement coach Alexandra Reynolds. Dialect coach Simone Dietrich helped him to learn Ralf’s specific German accent. And make-up designer Melanie Lenihan and prosthetics designer Richard Martin took more than four hours to get Eddie into his identity as Ralf.

2. A globetrotting trail of destruction

Bianca and the Jackal’s chase takes them on an Instagram-worthy scenic tour of old Europe. But like the Jackal, quite a few of the locations aren’t what they seem to be. 

The Jackal’s home base villa in Cadiz, Spain was really filmed at Villas Rosa dei Venti in Rabac, Croatia, and based on the house that the series’ screenwriter, Ronan Bennett, lives in. Franjo Tudjman Airport in Zagreb stood in for Seville’s Airport terminal in Spain. Scenes featuring Norman Stoke’s home in Belarus were really shot in Labin, Croatia. Afghanistan scenes were shot on Island Pag in Croatia. A scene in which the Jackal is abseiling off a hotel balcony in Munich was really shot at the Strabag House building in Vienna, Austria. The Sparrow’s haberdashery shop, which is supposedly in Belfast, Ireland, was filmed at the Sewing and Craft Superstore in Balham, London. And Budapest, Hungary stood in for Estonia’s capital, Tallinn, in a pivotal assassination scene, which was filmed at Budapest’s Müpa Theatre. 

PS: Real and on-screen locations include Paris, Keleti railway station in Budapest, Budapest’s Heroes’ Square and Museum of Fine Arts, Zagreb in Croatia, and London in the UK. 

3. A family man’s secret life

At home The Jackal is Charles Calthrop, husband to Nuria and father to a young son, Carlito (Adonay and Saul Barajas), who’s named after him. The Jackal can speak multiple languages fluently. Charles, however, still hasn’t managed to piece together basic Spanish despite being surrounded by Nuria’s family including her mother, Marisa (Puchi Lagarde), and brother, Alvaro (Jon Arias), who’s making deals with some rather dangerous people. The Jackal shoots people. The only thing that Charles is checking out with binoculars is interesting bird species. The Jackal fumes when a client tries to cheat him out of 3.75-million Euro. Charles’s “clients” aren’t nearly that rich. And if, at his son’s birthday party, Charles is adamant that none of his mother-in-law’s family snaps get posted on Facebook, that’s all about protecting his kid like a good father, right? 

Unfortunately for his marriage, though, the Jackal’s frequent “business” trips and secretive behaviour start making Nuria suspect that Charles is cheating on her, and she begins to snoop into his affairs and his secret room in their villa. When she comes too close to the truth, the Jackal will have some difficult decisions to make. 

4. An underhanded intelligence agent on the hunt

Lashana, who’s a co-executive producer on The Day of the Jackal, had previously interviewed women in the secret service and in London’s metropolitan police forces about the difficulties of work-life balance while researching her role as Nomi – Bond’s successor as Agent 007 in the James Bond film No Time to Die. 

From her locs to her streetwear style, Lashana’s character, Bianca, stands out in the staid men’s world of MI6, where her pushback against their expectations that she, as a Black woman, needs to behave like Miss Congeniality 24/7, has her boss calling her a “pain in the arse”, and gets her branded “difficult” despite her clear competence at everything from spotting clues like the Jackal’s interesting backpack, to handling weapons herself. 

Despite their lack of faith and support – and the fact that she’s as fun to be around as a wet Wednesday –  Bianca is a razor-sharp risk taker. She is willing to cross some major lines in pursuit of her target, including blackmailing a mole, covering up a death in custody, and torturing an informant. This dirty cop-style unpredictability makes her the perfect foil for the Jackal, whose tactics have allowed him to run circles around MI6’s conventional players. 

5. Weapons porn

He might not have Bond’s quartermaster, Q, to rustle up his weapons, but the Jackal doesn’t arrive empty handed. The series will have gearheads glued to the screen right from the first episode, when firearms expert Bianca analyses surveillance footage and recognises signs that the Jackal’s highly specialised, collapsible sniper rifle – which was precise enough that he could make his kill from 3 800 meters away, was probably made by Northern Irish gunsmith Norman Stoke (Richard Dormer). And in episode 5, we see the Jackal and Norman use a 3D printer to create an untraceable gun that can be hidden in an orthoepedic boot, since the gun is printed using a similar polymer, which makes it invisible to security scanners. 

PS: Eddie has weapons training with army specialist Paul Billis for the role. As for that “impossible” shot, the current longest-recorded distance for a sniper’s kill is held by Ukrainian Viacheslav Kovalskyi, at 3 800 meters (using a MCR “Horizon’s Lord” sniper rifle), in November 2023. 

6. An escape artist

The Jackal drowns out any emotions he might feel about killing people through breaking down his assassination operations into a minutely detailed to-do list. But when the unexpected happens – like when a roof moves out from under him and leaves him dangling from the ceiling in a nest of wires, or he realises that MI6 has captured a close associate of his, or a second assassin arrives on the scene (requiring a last-minute re-think on how to take out his target before the deadline) – the Jackal thinks on his feet. He uses everything from close combat skills to sexy seduction, and even crying on demand, to escape detection and captivity.

In episode 8’s flashback scenes, the Jackal’s origin story explores one of his early uses of deadly deception to escape. And we see him covering his tracks by making it seem as if the murders he committed were perpetrated by enemy forces during the war in Afghanistan. When in doubt, dead men tell no tales.

7. A cat-and-mouse game

This chase is not a simple case of a good spy chasing an evil assassin. Both are willing to kill anyone who gets in their way and to bulldoze through obstacles, including colleagues and family. 

The fact that the Jackal made a record-beating sniper kill in episode 1 promises to be a real problem for him, as it catches the attention of MI6, as well as drastically narrowing down the field of specialists who’re even capable of making a shot at that range. With CCTV footage in hand, Bianca is soon able to narrow down the field even further, by noting that both the Jackal’s backpack and one of his weapons are British-made, and not widely available. Step by step, clue by clue, and mistake after mistake – with the Jackal’s clock ticking down to the day by which he needs to assassinate his target – Bianca and the Jackal come closer and closer together. And at one point we see them just seats apart on the same airplane, with Bianca unaware, but the Jackal sweating under his prosthetics. Will our nails survive the tension?

Stream The Day of the Jackal now. New episodes Mondays from 20:30

10 cloak-and-dagger series and movies to watch next

1. The Sympathizer

Spy drama series based on Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Sympathizer. The story follows a half-French, half-Vietnamese communist spy known as The Captain (Hoa Xuande) during the final days of the Vietnam War and into his new life as a refugee in Los Angeles, where he works as a mole for the CIA under recruiter Agent Claude, played by Robert Downey Jr, who also appears as the Captain’s grad school mentor – history Professor Robert Hammer – politician Ned Godwin, filmmaker Niko Damianos and the priest who councils the Captain.

2. Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me and Austin Powers in Goldmember

Comedian Mike Myers plays British Intelligence agent Austin Powers, who was frozen in swinging 1960s London, and brought back to life in the late 1990s and early 2000s to take on his old nemesis, Dr Evil (also Mike Myers). Thanks to this perfect spoof of the Roger Moore and Sean Connery-era Bond films, and the Bourne movies, the 007 films had to get a complete reboot.

3. The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Supremacy, The Bourne Ultimatum, The Bourne Legacy and Jason Bourne

This hard-hitting series of spy action films, starring Matt Damon as Jason Bourne, is based on the character and conspiracies created by author Robert Ludlum in his Bourne books (aside from Legacy, which focuses on Jeremy Renner’s agent/assassin character, Aaron Cross). After an accident destroys his memory, Jason has to uncover the truth about who trained him as an assassin, while dodging death daily because his existence threatens powerful government officials.

4. Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit

Chris Pine plays author Tom Clancy’s most famous spy character in this action movie directed by Kenneth Branagh. The film fills in some of Jack Ryan’s back story, before taking us into his “boring” undercover CIA job on Wall Street, where he’s able to track the financial end of Russian politics and election fraud as an auditor.

5. The Equalizer, The Equalizer 2 & The Equalizer 3

Denzel Washington plays retired intelligence agent-turned-globetrotting vigilante Robert McCall in this series of action films directed by Training Day’s Antoine Fuqua. McCall takes on criminals the law won’t touch, from sex traffickers, to assassin rings, to Italy’s Mafia-like Camorra.

6. The Equalizer Season 1-4

“If there is anybody who can help, it’s McCall.” You say it, she slays it: Queen Latifah plays ex-CIA operative Robyn McCall, who helps victims who can’t call 911, or have to dodge the cops to avoid more trouble. Based on the Denzel Washington Equalizer films.

7. Special Ops: Lioness

Senior CIA operative Kaitlyn Meade (series co-producer Nicole Kidman, who teamed up with Yellowstone’s Taylor Sheridan to create the series) heads up the Lioness program, which assigns female operatives to go undercover on missions in the United States’ “War on Terror”. Kaitlyn’s Head of Operations, Joe (Zoe Saldaña), recruits and trains women like Cruz Manuelos (Laysla De Oliveira) to infiltrate global terrorist organisations like ISIS in areas where, as women, their presence will be dismissed as irrelevant. 

8. Safe House

Low-level CIA officer Matt Weston (Ryan Reynolds) is in charge of the agency’s Cape Town safe house, where other agents are interrogating Tobin Frost (Denzel Washington). When mercenaries attack the house, Weston flees with Frost and has to keep him alive and safe in the city, while figuring out who they can trust, and who’s threatened by what Frost knows.

9. Inside Man

Hostage negotiator Detective Keith Frazier (Denzel Washington) plays cat and mouse with criminal mastermind and bank robber Dalton Russell (Clive Owen) during his plot to pull off the perfect heist at a Manhattan bank, while the bank’s shadowy founder Arthur Case (Christopher Plummer) hires fixer Madeleine White (Jodie Foster) to protect the contents of one specific safe deposit box from the robbers.

10. BlackkKlansman

Spike Lee’s biographical crime comedy-drama is based on Ron Stallworth’s 2014 memoir Black Klansman, which details his work as an undercover cop who infiltrated white supremacist organisation the KKK. With John David Washington as Detective Ron Stallworth, Adam Driver as Detective “Flip” Zimmerman, and Topher Grace as KKK leader David Duke.

Also watch: Miss Congeniality and Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous; Men In Black II, Men In Black 3 and Men in Black: International; The Cleaning Lady Season 1-3; C.I.Ape; Blacklight; Trackers; Strike Back Season 1-7; and Alex Rider Season 1-3.