Catherine Zeta-Jones has been on screen since “The Darling Buds of May” in the early nineties, and in all that time she has never once used her own accent. “Kill Jackie” is the first thing she has ever made that lets her. AMC+ put the first trailer out this week ahead of a 2 October premiere, and the Swansea vowels land in the opening seconds, before a single gun does. It is a small thing that reframes everything around it. The voice is not a costume she is putting on for a role. It is the one she stopped using to get the roles.
The setup is straightforward enough to fit on a card. She plays Jackie Price, a glamorous art dealer with a past she has spent years outrunning, and the past in question is international drug smuggling. Someone has hired a squad of professional assassins called the Seven Demons to kill her, and Jackie’s response is to go after them first, one at a time. It is adapted from Aidan Truhen’s novel “The Price You Pay,” and the eight-part series was co-created by Conor Keane, Tom Butterworth of “Gangs of London,” Peter Lawson of “John Wick” and Damon Thomas of “Killing Eve,” with Thomas as lead director and Butterworth as showrunner. Read that list of credits and the trailer’s behaviour makes sense before you have watched a frame of it.
Someone hired the Seven Demons. They are professional assassins, genuine psychopaths.”
The opening shot is the Guggenheim in Bilbao, and Zeta-Jones walks out of it in fur like she owns the building. Within fifteen seconds that poise is gone. Masked men are standing in her living room in front of a wall of Warhol-style pop-art portraits, one of them swinging something at her head, and the trailer immediately cuts away into a montage of what she used to be: banknotes riffling through a counting machine, bricks of cash, a rolled note and a line of cocaine beside a smear of lipstick, and a single enormous blue eye. Her own voice narrates over it. “Well, you knew I wasn’t always in art. And what I used to do for a living was…” The sentence never finishes. It does not need to.
The middle stretch is where the money is on screen, and it is spent on geography. There is a private jet on a wet apron and then the same jet banking low over open water. There is San Juan de Gaztelugatxe, the Basque islet with the hermitage on top, shot from the mainland. There is an infinity pool looking down over the whole sweep of La Concha bay in San Sebastián. There is a snowbound mountain road, a speedboat, a red car threading a vineyard, and a hard cut to Westminster Bridge and Big Ben graded so cold it is nearly blue. The production shot in Swansea, Bilbao, Lisbon and London, and the trailer is plainly aware that this is its most expensive asset.
What it does with all that scenery is more interesting than the scenery. The tone keeps snapping. A pistol duel breaks out in a sunlit municipal park with a man in a maroon varsity jacket firing into a crowd of ordinary people. Zeta-Jones eats an ice cream in front of a row of pastel apartment blocks. A wedding happens, complete with white doves and a veil. A man in a cream suit reclines in an armchair like a Bond villain who has already won. And there is a wall of handguns pegged up like a hardware display, which is either a joke about how organised this business is or a straight statement of intent.
The dialogue is doing the same job as the edit, which is to keep undercutting itself. “Do you ever get that feeling when things go bad? Like there’s something much worse coming for you.” That is the trailer’s opening line, and it is delivered as a musing rather than a threat. Later somebody asks her, flatly, “Did you really bite off someone’s ear in London?” She does not deny it. “That was a small misunderstanding.” Somewhere in the back half she says “I think I have to kill them all,” and it reads less like a decision than an admission. The single most revealing line is not hers at all — one of the men brought into this against his will simply says “Bollocks,” which tells you exactly what register this show is playing in.
There is a real family thread underneath the set pieces, and the trailer is careful with it. A young woman appears repeatedly alongside Jackie — at the foot of the plane steps, then aiming a pistol herself, then with a gun held to her own temple by somebody in a suit. Jackie’s line over the top of it is the one that actually stings: “They’re coming for me and anyone I know.” The cast list is enormous and deep — Daniel Ings, Sidse Babett Knudsen, Óscar Jaenada, Darci Shaw, Raff Law, Julian Rhind-Tutt, Julian Barratt, Bill Paterson, Jonathan Cake and Ron Perlman among many others — and the trailer wisely does not try to introduce any of them.
Then it does the smartest thing in its whole two minutes. Two title cards drop in, spaced about six seconds apart. The first, in hot pink, reads “YOU WILL PAY.” The second, in deep purple and already fading, reads “THE PRICE.” Put them together and you have “The Price You Pay,” which is the name of the novel this is adapted from. It is a quiet piece of credit paid to the source in a format that almost never bothers, and you only catch it if you are watching the cards rather than the explosions.
The last stretch is a straight sprint: a helicopter, an elevator brawl, a motorbike chase, a man screaming in a vineyard, two women lying bloodied in shallow water, and a man in a bed with a gun in his mouth who appears to be enjoying it. Then a card reading “THIS OCTOBER,” then Zeta-Jones in a headscarf at a market stall staring directly down the lens, then the title. It is a lot of series to promise in 123 seconds.
Whether it holds together for eight hours is a different question, and the honest answer is that this trailer does not tell us. What it does establish is that somebody finally gave Catherine Zeta-Jones a part built around the specific thing that makes her recognisable rather than around the accent she learned to hide it. “Kill Jackie” streams on AMC+ in the United States from 2 October, and on Prime Video in the UK, Ireland and a run of European territories on the same date.
What Do You Think? Is a returning-to-her-roots performance enough to carry eight episodes, or does “Kill Jackie” need the Seven Demons to be genuinely good villains rather than a countdown? Does the tonal whiplash in this trailer — pop art and ice cream against sledgehammers and cocaine — read as confidence or as a show that has not decided what it is? And after “National Treasure: Edge of History” lasted one season, does Zeta-Jones finally have a series that will get a second?
See you on the next binge!
