Director: Ronan Bennett
A single job goes wrong, and suddenly the world's most careful assassin is being hunted by the one intelligence officer patient enough to catch him.
What is The Day of the Jackal about?
The Jackal disappears into whatever face a contract requires — a different accent, a different posture, a different name at every border crossing — and gets paid to make political problems vanish without a trace back to whoever hired him. After a hit on a prominent, widely disliked politician goes public in the worst possible way, he's offered a job large enough to let him walk away from this life entirely, if he can survive long enough to finish it. On the other side of the hunt is Bianca, an MI6 officer who has spent years piecing together fragments of a man everyone else assumes is a myth, and who now has the first real thread connecting his methods to his next target. What follows plays out across cities and disguises, but the tension comes from something smaller: two people who are both extremely good at their jobs, each certain the other will make one mistake, and both running out of time to be right.
Cast & crew
Eddie Redmayne plays the title role as a study in control, letting stillness do most of the work while the character reshapes his identity from scene to scene. Lashana Lynch matches him as the officer closing in, with Úrsula Corberó, Chukwudi Iwuji, Khalid Abdalla and Lia Williams filling out the network of handlers, targets and family caught in the crossfire.
Context & significance
The series takes its premise from Frederick Forsyth's 1971 novel of the same name, a book that basically invented the modern assassin-thriller template, but resets the plot for the present day rather than restaging the Cold War original. Showrunner Ronan Bennett keeps the tradecraft grounded — surveillance, forged documents, the logistics of disappearing — instead of leaning on spectacle, which is part of why the show reads as a slow-burn thriller rather than an action series even as its body count rises.
Where & how to watch
The Day of the Jackal is available on K-Time with Farsi dubbing and subtitles, and the title page can be browsed and read without creating an account — watching the episodes just requires a free K-Time login. The platform's search and interface are designed for Farsi-speaking viewers, so finding this series and picking up where you left off works the same in either language.