His most recent project is a little more obviously aligned with his abilities. Day of the Jackal is an espionage thriller series that follows Eddie Redmayne’s elusive hitman-for-hire (the aforementioned Jackal) as he evades an MI6 effort to capture him, led by Lashana Lynch’s know-it-all weapons expert. Redmayne and Lynch’s prep for the more technical aspects of the role began in a classroom, with Biddiss leading lessons on how they might move around a corner, use a reflection to check what’s going on around them or handle a gun.
Then they had to put it into practice. Biddiss designed an exercise for Redmayne where he’d have to follow a target and gather intelligence on her movements, without being spotted or tracked down by a third counter-surveillance operative. Biddiss didn’t tell Redmayne that his own wife would be playing the mark. (“Females are much more threat-aware,” he explains.) An army wife with an army wife’s sense of humor, at one point she went into a drugstore and, knowing that Redmayne would have to follow her and report back on her actions in there in full, purchased some Anusol. Biddiss remembers Redmayne emerging from the pharmacy and telling him, with all of the seriousness the situation demanded, that the target appeared to have bought some haemorrhoid cream. Biddiss gave the best straight-faced nod he could muster. “That could be a clue,” he said. Biddiss’s wife eventually ended the operation by tapping Redmayne on the back and offering him some pile cream, and the star returned the favour when her birthday came around by texting her from location in Croatia, wishing her many happy returns and informing her that he’d bought her some of the finest pile cream the Croats could offer.
But it wasn’t all japes and hemorrhoids. What really makes Day of the Jackal is the detail—how thoroughly every element of what Redmayne’s character does has been considered. He’s Bond for nerds, after all. In the first episode, we see Redmayne’s Jackal set up for a world-record-surpassing sniper shot with a precision that perfectly sets the tone for what we can expect from him over the rest of the series. He leaves absolutely nothing to chance. He sets up a little gauge, to give him a rough sense of the strength of the wind. He takes a test shot to see how far from the intersection of his scope’s crosshairs the bullet will land, because of the wind and the curvature of the earth. And unlike most snipers you see in the movies, his bullet takes a good six seconds to get there. Then he “zeroes” his weapon, a-la a set of baking scales, and shoots again. All of that detail is Biddiss.
This being the world of TV and film, his advice can’t always be implemented in its entirety. It would actually have been 12 seconds that the bullet would’ve spent travelling to its target, not six, Biddiss says. But he appreciates that sometimes, there are creative reasons for not obeying everything he suggests to a tee. “You have to remember that it’s not documentary,” he says. “It’s drama. There’s some artistic license.” And though there will always be people on social media complaining about the inaccuracy of certain elements of a show or movie (hobbyist battle re-enactors are the worst apparently), Biddiss takes comfort in reminding himself that he’s done what he can within the limits of his role. “I train the guys. I don’t write the script,” he says. “I advise. That’s my job.”
This story originally appeared in British GQ.
