The Day of the Jackal

Brian Kirk's The Day of the Jackal launched on Sky Atlantic and Peacock in November 2024 across ten episodes and was renewed for a second season within a fortnight of its premiere — one of the fastest greenlight turnarounds in Sky's commissioning history. The series is a contemporary reframing of Frederick Forsyth's 1971 novel of the same name, previously adapted as Fred Zinnemann's 1973 feature with Edward Fox and as Michael Caton-Jones' looser 1997 update with Bruce Willis.

The lead, Eddie Redmayne, was nominated for the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Limited Series in early 2025 and was widely considered to have given one of the strongest screen performances of his career — placing him alongside his Academy Award winning work in The Theory of Everything. The supporting cast includes Lashana Lynch, Charles Dance (in his last screen role before his death later in 2025), Úrsula Corberó, Eleanor Matsuura and Khalid Abdalla.

The screenplay is by Ronan Bennett, the Irish novelist and television writer behind Top Boy; Kirk directs the first three episodes, with subsequent episodes directed by Anu Menon, Karen Gaviola and Yann Demange. Cinematography is by Stephen Wakeham. The series was shot across Hungary, Spain, Slovakia and the United Kingdom over an unusually long six-month schedule. Kirk had previously directed episodes of Game of Thrones, Penny Dreadful, Hard Sun and Boardwalk Empire; The Day of the Jackal is now treated as the most prominent showcase of his work as the central directing presence on a major series.