'A Job of Wins': Day of the Jackal Prosthetics Designer Richard Martin on Transforming Eddie Redmayne
How do you make Eddie Redmayne look like a grizzled, badly aged older man? Set aside a few hours.
Welcome to the wild and wonderful era of Emmy Awards: Phase 1, a time before nomination voting when the arbitrary rules governing what is timely are set aside, and we can discuss projects that were released weeks or months earlier and deserve to be top of mind again. (Sidenote: You can take these as my personal recommendations for viewing until networks start sponsoring content. Life’s too short to write about nonsense without getting paid for it.) The Day of the Jackal premiered on Peacock November 14, 2024.
In the opening moments of Peacock’s stylish, very bingeable The Day of the Jackal, the Jackal—an aloof, elite assassin prone to elaborate disguises, played by Eddie Redmayne in all his chiseled glory—is adopting the persona and the facial features of a man lying slumped dead in an armchair, mouth slack, tongue slightly lolling out. The trick is that they’re both Redmayne.
That’s thanks to prosthetics designer Richard Martin (The Substance), who assuaged the creative teams’ stress and fears during his initial Zoom call by reassuring them that, yes, he could render unrecognizable an Oscar-winning actor with bone structure like architecture. ”You could feel the tension around the room ebb,” he says. “It was like, ‘Oh, phew!’ Then all that tension piled on my shoulders.”
As Martin says, “practical effects are alive and well,” something that the series’ production designer Richard Bullock will talk more about in a different article later this week. (I really loved the crafts on Day of the Jackal, what can I say?) And the choice to create a body rather than hire an extra was, as Martin says, “a stroke of genius” on the part of Brian Kirk, who directed the first three episodes.
“It's very difficult to make anyone look identical to somebody that exists because there are certain things you can't change,” Martin says. “You can't change the distance of the eyes, the length of the nose, all those things are. It was Brian's idea to focus on making Eddie look like somebody else, then make a dummy that looks the same. And it was a lovely process to do.”
In the initial meeting with Kirk, the producers, and the makeup designer, they all decided that the dead man the Jackal is recreating would be a down-and-out type, ith mottled skin and eye bags. And, I cannot reiterate this enough, this level of detail is given to a character Redmayne plays for all of seven minutes.
Once the look was settled upon, Martin and Redmayne set to work to create the corpse. That process included posing Redmayne in the makeup in the position in which the dead body would be introduced. Taking into account gravity, among other things, they could then begin to build the dummy that would co-star in the scene with Redmayne.
Ultimately, Martin designed four disguises for the Jackal, and only two were used. But the series takes seriously the labor-intensive process the Jackal must undergo for his transformations. “This whole job to me was a job of wins,” Martin says. “We've seen it so many times where we have to suspend disbelief, where they just pull a mask off and they're all perfect and their hair's coiffed and they're ready to run off and fight the bad guy. That's not how it works.”
Redmayne was insistent on bringing authenticity to the sequences where the Jackal sweatily and meticulously removes his disguises, because it’s an integral part of the character. “It was really nice to have the opportunity to give that back to my industry,” Martin says. “I'm working on Masters of the Universe at the moment, so I've got 40 odd other prosthetic artists, and they've all come up to me and gone, ‘Brilliant to actually see the reality of what we have to do.’ I don't think that's really been seen that much.”
The first episode finds the Jackal removing a disguise; later in the series, we watch him apply one, disguising himself as an even older character. By then, Redmayne had undergone 11 applications, so he had a pretty comprehensive sense of the process. “ I broke the makeup down in such a way that it's like a jigsaw that you reassemble in a certain order,” Martin says. I made sure that the pieces were small enough that they were manageable. But Eddie didn't struggle with it at all. By this stage, honestly, I think I could have let him stick his own makeup on and he would've done a fairly decent job. Maybe next season!”
Richard Martin’s credits include The Substance, Season 3 of The White Lotus, and Poor Things. His go-to at craft services? “I absolutely love a ginger shot. I'm all about the ginger. You're doing long days, and I've found it's like a natural Red Bull.”