Abhiroop Das
Co-created by Tom Butterworth, Conor Keane, Peter Lawson, and Damon Thomas, ‘Kill Jackie‘ follows the eponymous main character as she is chased from hell and back by a mysterious group of assassins. Once the leader of the drug industry, Jackie Price now leads a quiet but luxurious life as an art dealer, until one day she walks into her home to find killers. Very soon, it becomes clear that the most fearsome assassin group in the world, named the Seven Demons, has been sent after her, and thus begins a journey that is equal parts a game of chess and a cat-and-mouse chase. Somewhere between Jackie’s tragic past and tumultuous present, however, lies a story about one’s trust in the greater good and the relationships they build over the years.
Kill Jackie Makes a Major Change in its Adaptation of a Fictional Novel
‘Kill Jackie’ is a work of fiction based on the novel ‘The Price You Pay’ by Nicholas Cornwell, who also uses the pen names Nick Harkaway and Aidan Truhen. Adapted for the screen by Tom Butterworth, Conor Keane, Peter Lawson, Damon Thomas, and the writing team, the show makes several major changes to the original story. The biggest change of them all is that the male main character, Jack Price, is transformed into Jackie Price. With her as the lead, the show peeks into a fictionalized world of the elite, but its inspirations can be traced back to reality. In a conversation with CrimeReads, Cornwell, speaking through a pretend dialogue between his aliases Nick and Aidan, revealed that the novel is his response to the political and social upheaval of 2016.
“The world stopped making sense to me in 2016,” Cornwell recalled in the interview, further explaining that he wanted to design a man who “gets confronted with a sea change in his circumstances and he goes for it.” To that end, he envisioned the protagonist’s journey as one of adaptation and the setting of a new normal, which is also felt in the TV counterpart. Through the story, Cornwell also set out to explore the various power dynamics within circles of wealth and how they affect society at large. While the novel may be inspired by a very specific sociopolitical phenomenon, Jackie’s story doesn’t seem to be based on any particular true story or anecdote.
In reimagining the story for the screen, the writing team made several sweeping changes to the plot, including the addition of a two-decade-long gap in the narrative timeline. While in the book, Jack is an active drug dealer from New York, who gets into a feud over the death of his neighbor, the show changes the story, showing Jackie trying to run away from a dark past as she is chased by assassins for reasons unknown. In doing so, the story also draws parallels to actor Catherine Zeta-Jones’ real life, as her own childhood hometown in Swansea, Wales, is used as the place where the fictional Jackie grew up.
The Seven Demons Are Designed to Feel Closer to Supervillains Than Real Life
Just as the larger story of ‘Kill Jackie’ is an invention, the assassin group known as the Seven Demons is also fictional in nature. Rather than being based on a real-life assassin clan or group, the Seven Demons appear to be Nicholas Cornwell’s take on conventions of crime stories. In his interview with CrimeReads, he explained the fictional logic of the eponymous seven assassins, noting, “that’s what supervillains do. Gangsters in black and white movies onward: they carve out a space where they can hold their physical environment to their own rules.” This explains why the demons are depicted as nigh-omnipotent characters, as their closest analogs appear to be fantastical, rather than real-life organized criminals and assassins.
While exploring the concept behind the assassin group, Cornwell looked into organized crime and digital crime, and their relationship to contemporary phenomena, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. In his descriptions of the group and its dynamics, the author also involved several fictional references, at one point comparing the characters’ relationships to each other to ‘The Addams Family.’ Poetically enough, this also ties into the fact that Catherine Zeta-Jones plays Morticia Addams in the Netflix show ‘Wednesday.’ Cornwell also drew connections to the show ‘Killing Eve,’ reinforcing the idea that the Seven Demons are based on fictional archetypes rather than real-life figures.
Read More: Kill Jackie Ending Explained: Does Jackie Beat the Seven Demons?
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