LONDON – Lashana Lynch fled from spies.

After playing Nomi in 2021’s “No Time To Die” she actively avoided any role that involved working for the Secret Service. What role could beat a Bond girl who took James Bond’s code name 007 from him?

“I said to myself, ‘No, I’m not going to do it again. It’s an inherited role. This is something that absolutely should not be touched forever,” Lynch recalls.

But then she read the character of Bianca Pullman for a TV series based on the classic Frederick Forsyth thriller. “The Day of the Jackal.” Bianca was also an employee of the British foreign intelligence agency, but the differences between the two MI6 employees were intriguing: while Nomi was slick, Bianca was a mess for Lynch to get into.

“I had been against this world for a long time and I felt like it was coming at me full force,” she says.

No one is happier that she jumped on board than Eddie Redmayne, who plays the Jackal, the mythical hired murderer. Her “versatility is insane,” he says, adding that Lynch even suggested the perfect song for the theme, “This Is Who I Am” by Celeste.

“The Day of the Jackal” Updates Fred Zinnemann 1973 film, starring Edward Fox as the black-tie killer hired to kill the French president.

Redmayne’s version inherits Fox’s gentlemanly style, living a life of quiet luxury and jet set, funded by eliminating a murder through ingenious devices, clever disguises and flawless planning. Bianca is an intelligence officer and weapons expert who will stop at nothing to find him, much to the dismay of her colleagues and family.

Lynch and Redmayne are also producers on the show, which airs on Sky in the U.K. and debuts Thursday on Peacock. They didn’t spend much time together on set, but saw each other in makeup, at the gym and reunited for this interview with the Associated Press.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.

AP: So you both worked really hard together on this, but the filming was completely separate?

REDMAYNE: It was so strange doing a job where you’re so intertwined with another character, and yet you don’t spend any time with the actor. But those moments we had on set were quite precious.

LYNCH: We won’t tell you what it was about.

AP: What was the strangest moment for you, where you looked in the mirror through someone else’s face?

REDMAYNE: The weird thing about prosthetics is that it’s such a long process – it’s not like you blink and you’ve changed. So you see this in layers and there are interesting moments throughout this process. But it was always at the end of the day that I would undress and I would sort of have this old German guard face and then my sort of skinny 40 year old body underneath. It was very disjointed and strange.

AP: Both characters have very questionable morality. Was this so that viewers would be pulled in two different directions?

LYNCH: That’s one thing that this show does really well and what Ronan (Bennett), our writer, did really well, is that the parallel storyline happened so seamlessly that you don’t really see it. come. And every episode you want to root for someone like Bianca, but the Jackal just makes sense. Even if he just did something completely heinous. You almost want to be him, which I think is the point.

AP: Did you take shooting training together?

LYNCH: No, although we did the spy training. Spy training, that was us just wandering around Covent Garden, looking through store windows, using our phones and rearview mirrors to find people, following them and recording them without them seeing them. It’s not just ordinary people on the street. This is someone we specifically mentioned!

AP: I’ve heard of this type of spy training before. The guys from “Slow Horses” I did it.

REDMAYNE: Did they? Oh no! They stole the show.

AP: Who was the best?

REDMAYNE: We didn’t do it on the same day. I’d have to ask Paul, our spy expert, about that, but I imagine Lashana was better.

LYNCH: No, no.

REDMAYNE: You’re kind of more adept in a corner, certainly with the weapons that you are. Because I spent most of my shooting training working on sniper rifles. So when it came to bits when I had to do this thing and move like that (mimes holding a gun) around the corner, I was kind of shit.