Eddie Redmayne on Fashion, Family, and His Thrilling New Peacock Series, ‘The Day of the Jackal’

One major throughline in this show, of course, is the challenge of maintaining a personal life when you’re very good at your very demanding job. I’m curious about how that side of the story sat with you. Like, with young kids, and a career in which you’re doing Broadway, you’re in films, you’re in a project like this…are you having the conversation where you’re like, “I’m going to do this big job and then I’m going to take a long break”? Or is your family kind of bopping around with you?

I’m someone that loves a bit of structure, and yet I live in this kind of completely fluid workplace in which you are always trying to make sense of the senseless. When my wife and I got together, I was trying to explain this nomadic, circus-like existence, and she’s much more free-spirited than I am. She’s like, “Great, we’ll travel the world together,” and that’s what we thought we would do. And then your kids start school, and the option of just upping them and taking them for six months to Budapest or for eight months to New York—life doesn’t work like that. So the short answer to your question is we’re still working it out, virtually daily.

What we try to do, though, is to lean into the idiosyncrasies the job brings. For example, I wouldn’t necessarily say that at age six and eight, city breaks are the holiday of choice. But my wife Hannah and the kids would come and join me in Budapest or Vienna, and then you see what that city has to offer—and the answer is some pretty wonderful things.

And in terms of the way that the Jackal’s family life shaped your characterization—as a viewer, you both believe that the Jackal cares about the people in his life, and rather doubt that he’d be very happy just staying at home.

There’s an addiction to him, and I think that that sings to a lot of people. [Laughs.] Lashana talks about how [work] is where Bianca’s most comfortable. There’s a kind of knotiness to both of these characters, in that they are exceptionally talented and have a sort of calling, albeit dark one. But one of the things that did intrigue me, honestly, about this piece when I read it was the character himself is an actor in many ways—and a capable one, in his languages and his prosthetics and his capacity to shapeshift. And so what became interesting was, for once, rather than sort of leaping out to a character, I kept saying, Okay, well if this was me, how would I go about this? I found that curious.