The Day of the Jackal

Brian Kirk's The Day of the Jackal launched on Sky Atlantic and Peacock in November 2024 with ten episodes and was renewed for a second season within a fortnight of its premiere, one of the fastest turnarounds in Sky's commissioning history. It moves Frederick Forsyth's 1971 novel of the same name into the present day. The book had already been filmed by Fred Zinnemann in 1973, with Edward Fox, and more loosely by Michael Caton-Jones in 1997, with Bruce Willis.

Eddie Redmayne was nominated for the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Limited Series in early 2025, and this is some of the strongest screen work he has done, worth setting beside his Academy Award-winning turn in The Theory of Everything. The supporting cast includes Lashana Lynch, Charles Dance, Úrsula Corberó, Eleanor Matsuura and Khalid Abdalla.

Ronan Bennett, the Irish novelist and television writer behind Top Boy, wrote it. Kirk directs the first three episodes, and Anu Menon, Karen Gaviola and Yann Demange direct the rest. Stephen Wakeham is the cinematographer, and 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 the most prominent series on which he has been the central directing presence.