🎧 Eddie Redmayne in the 'Actor's Playground'
'The Day of the Jackal' star and EP on playing an assassin and the odd pressure of no longer auditioning. Plus: Video game awards are here
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Winning an Oscar for 2014’s The Theory of Everything meant that Eddie Redmayne had to learn something he’d never had to do before: Trust his instincts.
“Before, I was an actor who would audition for anything that was sent my way and if I got it I did it, pretty much,” Redmayne told me during a recent call from his London home, after he’d put his children to bed. “Then The Theory of Everything came and changed that, and you become someone who is a financeable asset. Suddenly you have choice, and that turns overnight.”
Being able to choose your roles is any actor’s dream, but also comes with a distinct pressure, which Redmayne, now 42, felt strongly after years of playing more supporting roles in such films as Elizabeth: The Golden Age and Les Miserables. “I was used to getting a script from my agent saying, you know, it’s the sequel to Elizabeth, there’s a part here they want you to audition for. I’m like, wow, if Cate Blanchett and Geoffrey Rush and Clive Owen think it’s great, I should be so lucky. The people whose names are attached to the thing almost would make the choice for you.”
On The Day of the Jackal, the hit new series from Britain’s Sky TV and Peacock, that’s precisely the position Redmayne finds himself in. He and his co-star Lashana Lynch both serve as executive producers and anchor the globetrotting thriller with their performances as, respectively, the cold-blooded sniper known only as The Jackal and the MI6 agent on his tail.
Redmayne, who says he grew up watching spy thrillers like the 1975 film also based on the novel of the same name, calls the series an “actor’s playground” in our conversation on this week’s Prestige Junkie podcast. Playing The Jackal, who dons a series of fake identities to evade capture, brought Redmayne back to his initial childhood fascination with acting: “You get into acting as a kid, because you enjoy changing the way your voice sounds and the way you look. It ticked all of those boxes.”
This week’s podcast also includes a conversation between me and my longtime Fighting in the War Room podcast co-host Matt Patches, diving into a topic he knows a lot about and I’m only barely beginning to understand: Video games. It’s a huge industry constantly threatening to surpass Hollywood in its capture of Americans’ attention, but only within the last 10 years has the games industry rallied around its own awards show — and all the voting complications and drama that come with it.
Do video games really need awards shows? Can anyone ever really determine the “best” anything? These are all questions the gaming industry is just beginning to answer — and might be learning some lessons from the good old-fashioned Oscars in the process.
