The Jackal (The Day of the Jackal) (2025)

The Jackal (The Day of the Jackal) (1)

The Jackal (The Day of the Jackal) (2)

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If you see Declan before you die, you tell him that he can't protect his women.
~ The Jackal, taunting Valentina Koslova as she dies.
There is no man in the world who is proof against an assassin’s bullet. De Gaulle’s exposure rate is very high. Of course it’s possible to kill him. The point is that the chances of escape would not be too high. A fanatic prepared to die himself in the attempt is always the most certain method of eliminating a dictator who exposes himself to the public. I notice that despite your idealism you have not yet been able to produce such a man. Both Pont-de-Seine and Petit-Clamart failed because no one was prepared to risk his own life to make absolutely certain.
~ The Jackal to Marc Rodin, Andre Casson and Rene Montclair.

The Jackal is the titular main antagonist of the 1971 novel The Day of the Jackal, its 1973 film adaptation of the same name, its 1997 remake The Jackal and the 2024 adaptation television series of the same name. He is an assassin for hire with a fearsome reputation in the criminal underworld.

He was portrayed by Edward Fox in the 1973 film and Bruce Willis, who also portrayed Muddy Grimes in Beavis and Butt-Head Do America, Lt. Muldoon in Planet Terror, himself in the music video for the Gorillaz song Stylo and Old Joe in Looper, in the 1997 film. He is portrayed by Eddie Redmayne, who also played Osmund in Black Death, Alex Forbes in Like Minds, Balem Abrasax in Jupiter Ascending, and Charles Cullen in The Good Nurse, in the 2024 series.

Contents

  • 1 Biography
    • 1.1 Novel and 1973 film
    • 1.2 1997 film
    • 1.3 2024 Television Series
      • 1.3.1 Backstory
      • 1.3.2 In the series
  • 2 Background
  • 3 Fake names
    • 3.1 Novel
    • 3.2 1973 film
    • 3.3 1997 film
    • 3.4 2024 Television Series
  • 4 Gallery
  • 5 Trivia

Biography[]

Novel and 1973 film[]

The novel and 1973 film adaptation characterise the Jackal as an Englishman in his early 30s who has been linked to the assassinations of Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo and Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba in 1961. Just prior to the DeGaulle contract, he had killed in Egypt two German, both of whom were engineers and part of Egyptian President Nassar's anti-Israel rocket programme. According to his abilities and skills, the Jackal was most likely a British Army sniper with combat experience (apparently in the Malayan Emergency), and then he could have worked for MI6 for a while. Shortly before becoming a hitman, he was a mercenary in the Congo crisis; a fellow mercenary he met out there, known simply as 'Louis', serves as a character reference.

The Jackal is hired by a far-right French terrorist group, the OAS (Organisation armée secrète, lit. "Secret Army Organisation") to assassinate French President Charles de Gaulle, who the OAS believe is a traitor because of his decision to grant independence to Algeria. The Jackal meets a triumvirate of OAS leaders (operations chief Lieutenant-Colonel Marc Rodin, treasurer Commandant Rene Montclair, and head of the OAS-CNR underground Andre Casson) at a small hotel in Vienna. He demands a total of US$500,000 (half in advance, half on completion to a bank in Switzerland), as he will need to retire after the job is done in order to hide from the French government. The assassin invents the codename of the Jackal ('Chacal' in French) after he is hired. When asked for his choice of code name in the novel, the Jackal replies: "Since we have been speaking of hunting, what about the Jackal? Will that do?". To pay the Jackal's fee, the OSA hires thugs to rob several banks and money trucks. Rodin, Montclair and Casson then go to ground in a hotel in Rome, taking over the top floor for themselves and the floor below for eight bodyguards, all drawn from the French Foreign Legion.

Taking elaborate precautions, the Jackal acquires a fake passport to get into France and forges identity documents to get him close to de Gaulle. He later commissions a special sniper rifle, a slender gun capable of being disassembled for smuggling into a secure area, and a supply of explosive-tipped mercury bullets, from Belgian master gunsmith Paul Goosens. He also steals two passports as contingent identities and purchases disguises to match. He kills the forger when the he tries to blackmail him, then locks the body in a case. The French secret service learns of the assassination plot after capturing and interrogating a Foreign Legion soldier named Corporal Viktor Wolenski, a bodyguard employed by Colonel Marc Rodin, the brains of the operation. Although Wolenski only knows of the codename 'Jackal' and the general intention about the plot, there is nothing more the French know. The French authorities put police detective Claude Lebel in charge of the investigation, tasking him with discovering the Jackal's real name and apprehending him.

Using OAS agent "Valmy" as a cut-out, the Jackal is kept fully informed of the French police's pursuit of him. On two occasions when the police get too close, he hides out with a wealthy woman he has seduced and a gay man he meets in a bathhouse, respectively. He kills both of them the woman because she discovered he was an assassin and the man when he remarked when he saw that his guest resembled a wanted notice on TV for the woman's murder.

Finally, on Liberation Day, 25 August 1963, the Jackal tries to snipe General de Gaulle with the custom rifle that he had smuggled into an apartment adjacent to a courtyard where the Liberation Day ceremony would take place, concealing the parts of the rifle within a set of crutches and disguising himself as a French veteran. However, President de Gaulle unexpectedly moves his head at the last moment, causing the Jackal to miss his first shot. As the Jackal prepares for a second shot, he is discovered by Lebel, who has tracked him there. The killer shoots a police officer who accompanies Lebel but, as he scrambles to reload his rifle with his last explosive bullet, Lebel grabs a sub-machine gun from the dead policeman and kills the assassin. The Jackal is buried two days later in an unmarked grave; only Lebel attends, anonymously. The death certificate identifies him as "an unknown foreign tourist, killed in a car accident". In a twist ending, the British discover that a suspect Charles Calthrop is both alive and is not the Jackal; they were mislead by the fact that "jackal" in French {Cha-cal) were the same as the first three letters of both parts of the Charles Calthrop name; at the end of the novel, there is the unanswered question: "If the Jackal wasn't Calthrop, then who the hell was he?"

1997 film[]

The 1997 film The Jackal substantially revises the character; in this version, he is an American feared underworld assassin and ex-Special Forces soldier turned informant, hired by Terek Murad, an Azerbaijani mobster, to kill the First Lady of the United States in retaliation of the death of his brother, Ghazzi, during a joint FBI-MVD operation. The Jackal charges $70 million, half up front and half on completion, for the hit, as he will need to disappear forever afterwards to hide from the police and the U.S. government.

In order to find the Jackal, the FBI recruits a convicted Irish Republican Army sniper named Declan Mulqueen, the Jackal's nemesis. Mulqueen had once had a relationship with a Basque Separatist named Isabella Zancona, and the two of them had met the Jackal years earlier. The Jackal had shot Isabella; although she survived, she miscarried Mulqueen's child. Zancona, who has since moved on, marrying another man and having a family, tells about the Jackal's participation in the Salvadoran Civil War as part of the Green Berets and describes him as a psychopath: "This man was ice, no feeling, nothing."

In preparation for the hit, the Jackal purchases a long-range heavy machine gun from a gunsmith named Ian Lamont. Later on, his contacts warn him over the dark web that hijackers are trying to steal it. He kills one of them with an unknown but extremely poisonous substance. Lamont tries to blackmail the Jackal by asking for more money in exchange for remaining silent, but he has underestimated just how dangerous his client is; while testing the weapon, the Jackal turns it on Lamont and kills him.

The Jackal seduces a gay politician named Douglas in order to steal his security clearance pass. When the FBI gets too close, the Jackal hides out at Douglas' house, only to kill him after he sees the Jackal's picture on a news broadcast describing him as a fugitive murderer.

Finally, he attacks Mulqueen's security detail, killing FBI agents Witherspoon and McMurphy and mortally wounding MVD agent Valentina Koslova. The Jackal taunts Koslova as she bleeds to death, telling her to tell Mulqueen that "he can't protect his women". Koslova later passes the message to Mulqueen before dying, and Mulqueen realizes that the assassin is targeting the First Lady of the United States, rather than the Director of the FBI, as they had originally believed.

The Jackal disguises himself as a policeman during the First Lady's speech at a children's cancer hospital, where he had intended to kill her, and mounts the machine gun in his minivan, planning to fire it by remote control from some distance away. When Mulqueen destroys the van and, with it, the machine gun's scope, the Jackal decides to start shooting wildly into the crowd, but FBI Deputy Director Carter Preston pushes the First Lady out of the way just before the weapon opens fire. The Jackal escapes into the subway, with Mulqueen giving chase and wounding him.

The Jackal grabs a young girl, Maggie, at the station and holds her hostage, threatening to kill her if Mulqueen doesn't drop his pistol. Mulqueen surrenders his weapon to save the girl, and the Jackal prepares to shoot him dead. At that moment, however, Zancona blindsides the Jackal from behind and shoots him in the neck, saving Mulqueen; the Jackal reflexively pulls the trigger of his pistol, wounding Mulqueen in the arm. As he lays bleeding on the ground, the Jackal reaches for a second pistol to kill Mulqueen, but Mulqueen draws first and shoots him multiple times, killing him. The next day, the Jackal is buried in an unmarked grave, with only Mulqueen and Preston as witnesses.

2024 Television Series[]

Backstory[]

In a very radical departure to the novel and both films, the 2024 TV series delves extensively into the Jackal's life. His real name is Alexander James Gordon Duggan, and his military career is explicitly confirmed as being British Army. Duggan initially went to the Royal Military Sandhurst to train as a commissioned officer; however, he dropped out and enlisted in the Parachute Regiment as a rank-and-file paratrooper, being trained at Army Training Centre Pirbright, and passing the sniper-commander course at Warminster. As a result of his training skills, Duggan was assigned to the Parachute Regiment's elite Pathfinder Platoon, serving numerous missions in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, as well as operations in Norway, Kosovo, Sierra Leone and Iraq, before being attached to Special Forces (presumably the SAS) and undertaking covert assassinations of Taliban leaders in Afghanistan.

However, on leave in Cyprus, Duggan was introduced to the concept of assassination for profit, and undertook a freelance mission with his trusted spotter, Gary Cobb. His employment with the British Army ended in 2013 when his section were sent on a mission to arrest a senior member of al-Qaeda in Helmand Province, Afghanistan; however, the mission went horribly awry and the section committed a war crime, massacring the wedding party where the al-Qaeda operator was hiding, and covering their tracks. Enraged, Duggan killed his entire squad by blowing up their armoured cars. He spared Gary (by sending him to check out a fake landmine), and used the confusion to fake his own death and disappear, becoming an assassin full time. He used the names "Jackal" and "Phantom" as codenames, taking them from the names of the armoured cars used during his time in the Paras (respectively, the Jackal MWMIK and the Phantom 380X).

Another radical departure is that the Jackal has a family in the TV series; under his alias of Charles Calthrop, he is married to a Spanish woman called Nuria, with whom he has fathered a son named Carlito; the family lives together in Cadiz, with Nuria under the impression that "Charles" is a corporate espionage troubleshooter.

In the series[]

In the TV series, the Jackal is hired by British financier Timothy Winthorp to kill Ulle Dag Charles (UDC), a naturalised American billionaire of Estonian and Palestinian ancestry. UDC has created a software programme called River, which he intends to launch to help locate and eliminate dark money from the world. Winthorp wants UDC dead within the month, before his software can be launched, and agrees to pay the Jackal ten million dollars, though the Jackal argues that he needs to be paid ten times this amount, given how protected UDC is.

Before he can start this project, the Jackal kills Elias Fest, a German publisher. Fest had hired the Jackal to kill his father, Manfred Fest, a right-wing businessman, politician and candidate for the post of Chancellor of Germany. The Jackal wounded Fest Jr in Munich, forcing him to be hospitalised. When Fest Sr showed up at the hospital where his son was being treated, the Jackal (disguised as a janitor named Ralf Becker) killed the politician with a record-breaking sniper shot. However, Fest Jr refused to pay the money he owed the Jackal. Using two more alias, the Jackal learned the location of Fest Sr's funeral, kidnapped Fest Jr, and shot him dead in rage.

The Jackal's killing of Fest Sr causes the British Secret Intelligence Service to grow suspicious. Ex-police firearms expert Bianca Pullman realises the gun, with collapsible barrel, could only have been made by Northern Irish gunsmith Norman Stoke. She realises the Jackal's military background and attempts to arrest Stoke in Berlin, but he kills Bianca's fellow agents, raising suspicions that there is a leak in MI6.

However, although Bianca fails to capture Stoke, she confiscates his suitcase, which reveals that he designed a collapsible sniper rifle for the Jackal, and that the weapon can be smuggled easily through security and not raise suspicions. Meanwhile, the Jackal returns to Spain from Germany via France, to reunite with his wife, though he is forced to kill a motorist and a policeman to further his escape. Bianca learns the Jackal's callsign, but discovers that Alexander Duggan (the Jackal's true identity) is the only British soldier capable of carrying out the assassination of Fest Sr, but that he died in an explosion in 2013. The Jackal then goes to Estonia to prepare for the UDC assassination.

Background[]

  • The Jackal is said to be in his early thirties.
  • He speaks excellent French.
  • In the novel and 1973 film, the Jackal is most likely former British Army sniper and Malayan Emergency veteran, according to his abilities.
  • The Jackal may have been an MI6 agent after his service in the British Army, given his skills in disguise and evading the law.
  • He apparently had experience as a mercenary soldier in Congo Crisis; his "contact" is a Belgium crime boss, based in Brussels; only the "contact" and his clients know the Jackal's real identity.
  • He charges very high prices for his "Contracts", with the exception of the de Gaulle contract which takes place in Europe. Of the Jackal's three suspected contracts, one takes place in the Dominican Republic, one in Egypt and one in the Congo.
  • He is probably a karate practitioner, because he killed a person with knifehand strike.
  • He resides in the expensive Mayfair part of London and keeps a few thousand pounds in a safe deposit box. Nevertheless, regardless of whether or not the OAS succeeds in taking over France, the Jackal is clever enough to know that de Gaulle-supporting partisans will not stop until they have tracked him down and killed him, or potentially if the OAS betray him; as a result, he has a emergency plan that he will retire as a millionaire to Lebanon after killing de Gaulle.

Fake names[]

Novel[]

  • Alexander James Quentin Duggan - whose birthday was very similar to the Jackal's. He sends in an application for a passport in the name of Duggan and uses this identity until he is forced to kill a woman, which requires him to switch identities.
  • Per Jensen - a Dane who shares the same rough build as the Jackal. He steals Jensen's passport from a hotel and uses this identity after killing a woman. He then abandons it and switches to Schulberg's when he arrives in Paris.
  • Martin Schulberg - an American who also looks fairly similar to the Jackal. He steals the passport from London Airport and uses it when he arrives in Paris. He then abandons it and switches to Andre Martin after deducing that Per Jensen would report his missing passport.
  • Andre Martin - a fictional French person who is apparently a war veteran. This identity is central to the Jackal's plot and the last one he creates.
  • Charles Calthrop - This is the identity of a former small-arms salesman who was in the Dominican Republic at the time Trujillo was assassinated. When Lebel uses his intelligence network contacts to search for the Jackal, he contacts Special Branch, and a member of SB later asks the Secret Intelligence Service for assistance. A man from the SIS then explains that he heard of a rumour, in which Calthrop has helped the partisans shoot the driver of Trujillo's armoured vehicle, causing the car to crash, which in turn allows his assassins to finish him. The British police from the novel assume that Calthrop is the Jackal's true identity, until the real Calthrop shows up at the end, after the Jackal has been killed. The police had erroneously concluded that chacal (i.e., Cha[rles] Cal[throp]) is French for "jackal", as well as the fact that the real Calthrop had gone on a holiday with what looked like fishing rods in his car, which cause them to jump to the conclusion that he was armed with weapons. All these, along with the fact that his passport had been left in his house, point the police in the wrong direction.
  • "Mr. Herr" - this is used by a Swiss banker to refer to the Jackal

1973 film[]

  • Paul Oliver Duggan

1997 film[]

  • Alexander Haslip
  • Charles Montrose

2024 Television Series[]

TBA

Gallery[]

The Jackal receiving a contract to assassinate the First Lady of the USA

The Jackal in disguise at an airport

The Jackal, in another disguise, notices that he is being followed

The Jackal testing out his new Gatling gun

The Jackal killing an innocent victim

The Jackal disguises himself as a policeman in order to take out the First Lady

The Jackal escaping from Declan Mulqueen through a subway station

The Jackal is killed after being shot repeatedly in the chest

Trivia[]

  • His code name was used by the real-life terrorist Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, already known under the code name "Carlos", was further nicknamed "The Jackal" after a copy of "The Day of the Jackal" belonging to a friend was found in his hiding place.
The Jackal (The Day of the Jackal) (2025)

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