It takes some serious work to make Eddie Redmayne look like a haggard old man.
Yet in Peacock's The Day of the Jackal, he's sometimes so creepily unrecognizable that if he stepped into an elevator, you'd probably step out.
As the title character in the 10-part series (based on Frederick Forsyth's 1971 novel of the same name), Redmayne plays an international assassin who keeps an arsenal of customized guns, multiple passports and stacks of different currencies at his seaside Spain mansion.
Mostly, though, he’s on the road or in the air, blending in by always looking different — but not so odd that he draws attention. On some jobs he's bald, on others his hair is combed back. He wears different noses, wigs, jowls and wrinkles.
The job of camouflaging Redmayne's angular face, ginger hair and slender frame fell to prosthetics designer Richard Martin, whose credits range from Gangs of London and Poor Things to the third season of White Lotus. He faced several challenges.
Director Brian Kirk (Game of Thrones, Luther) insisted he "didn't want it to be just Eddie and makeup," Martin says from his home in Birmingham, England. "Ah, that's a bit tricky, that!"
"We had the opportunity to scan Eddie," Martin adds. "So rather than do a live cast and more traditional sort of gunk on the face, I was able to get a 3-D scan of Eddie's head."
With that, Martin "could digitally sculpt concepts on the digital copy and then present to the producers and any director, without actually having to put clay to anything — without going too far down the rabbit hole in the wrong direction."
The pilot episode's old man is the most shocking incarnation, with his shoulder hump, cigarette-stained teeth and rheumy eyes, but Redmayne looks credible throughout the series, no matter how subtle or massive the changes.
For Martin, who grew up enchanted by special-effects pioneer Ray Harryhausen, this is a dream job. In the series, Redmayne's character creates these transformations himself. Viewers might wonder: Could someone do this? Part of the fun of this lone-wolf killing machine, who’s also a devoted husband and father, is that you believe he could.
"Is this far-fetched?" Martin recalls people asking during a production meeting. "'Is it possible that somebody could do this?' Well, yeah, because I do it. And I'm just a person. I’m not an assassin."
The Day of the Jackal is now streaming on Peacock.
This article originally appeared in emmy Magazine, issue #13, 2024, under the title "Killer Makeup."
