Eddie Redmayne made every effort to spend quality time with his young family despite shooting on location for The Day of the Jackal. The upcoming Sky Atlantic drama, based on Frederick Forsyth’s 1971 political thriller novel of the same name, sees the Academy Award-winning actor taking on the titular role with Lashana Lynch and Charles Dance in support.

Unlike the 42-year-old’s latest feature film project, The Good Nurse, which was shot in New York, The Day of the Jackal remake was filmed across Europe. The actor and his wife Hannah Bagshawe, 41, decided against moving around with their children Iris, eight, and Luke, six, and instead based themselves in London while Eddie was working.

“There was a time when Hannah and I first got together where the plan was for us to live this nomadic sort of circus-like life and travel and do everything together,” he recalled in an interview to Express. But the reality is, once you have kids and they start in school and they make friends and have their own life, the idea of taking them around gets harder, so each job I take, we [have to] make a call on.”

Filming for the Sky Original series began in Budapest in June 2023. The star then headed to film scenes in Vienna a month later before eventually wrapping up the job in Croatia.

Eddie explained that when he was off duty, he would try to “nip back” to the UK capital to spend weekends with his children and spouse of ten years. “There were a lot of logistics involved,” he admitted.

“When I was in Budapest I would nip back for weekends when I could, they would come out for school holidays, or we would meet in Vienna, we managed to work it out.”

The Fantastic Beasts favourite went on to reveal that his brood would be celebrating his wife’s birthday while he was shooting in Croatia.

“[I was] miles away from an airport, it was going to take four hours to drive to the airport to then get on a plane to fly home, and since I only had two days off, I would then have had to come straight back.

“But it was either that or them coming to me and it would have taken them an age to come that way, obviously,” he continued.

“But then we realised that it only took three hours for me to drive to Venice, so – in the most Jackal-like move ever – we came up with the idea to meet in Venice, which we did and celebrated her birthday there, which was incredible.”

However, Eddie and Hannah feared that their children would not take well to the capital city of Italy’s Veneto region.

“We were a bit worried about the kids at first because I myself didn’t go to Venice until I was in my twenties and we did think, ‘Are they too young to go there?’ But they were fine,” he added.

The Day of the Jackal is set to premiere on Sky Atlantic on November 7 at 9pm.