NOBODY'S PERFECT

Eddie Redmayne has won rave reviews as an assassin in a TV adaptation of The Day of the Jackal’ but Geoffrey Macnab says it isn’t a patch on the 1973 movie starring Edward Fox

- Geoffrey Macnab

Eddie Redmayne as an ace assassin? To some people, the casting for the new TV adaptation of The Day of the Jackal doesn't make any sense. The whole point of the killer - the titular "Jackal" - is that he can always melt into a crowd. He's the everyman who doesn't attract a second glance, the classless, bland-looking, unthreatening Englishman without any obvious machismo. Bank tellers and railway station guards who speak with him one moment will probably already have forgotten what he looked like or said the next. He’s Mr Nobody with a concealed gun.

Fantastic Beasts actor Redmayne is a dubious choice for such a role – an immediately recognisable movie star with striking leading-man looks. Reviews have been effusive in their praise of his performance, but reservations around the casting remain. More than three decades ago, High Noon director Fred Zinnemann chose the opposite tack when adapting Frederick Forsyth’s novel The Day of the Jackal for the first time. His classic 1973 adaptation worked so well precisely because Zinnemann didn’t choose a star for the role, opting instead for the then little-known Edward Fox.

Other major names had been angling hard for the part. “Before [Fox] was cast, my father got a telephone call from America from Jack Nicholson,” Jonathan Woolf, the son of producer John Woolf, tells me. “Nicholson had read the book, knew the film was coming, and was absolutely desperate to play the part – so desperate he said, ‘I am going to get on the plane, pay for the ticket myself, come and see you, and persuade you to cast me.’” The elder Woolf met the Cuckoo’s Nest star in London, telling him: “Thank you very much, but I’m afraid that, great actor that you are, that’s the problem!”

Nicholson wasn’t the only one. ”You’re too well known,” Zinnemann warned Roger Moore (then at the start of his stint as James Bond) after he too came sniffing round the part.