Catherine Zeta-Jones: 'I've always felt very close to the Irish because of my nana'
Catherine Zeta Jones in Kill Jackie, on Prime Video.
stars Catherine Zeta-Jones as a former criminal whose elaborate and bloody security system is activated by the images and music of Tom Jones.
It’s not unusual that the actress embraced the chance to go full Welsh for the first time in her career. The surprise and fun is in how she and the filmmakers lean into that premise. In one attempt on her life, intruders break into her apartment only to discover three Andy Warhol-style images of Tom Jones which lift up to deploy machine guns and much more.
Is this the biggest mass assassination carried out on screen to the music of Tom Jones? “It has to be! It has to be, and that security system bloody well worked, didn't it?” laughs the Welsh actress. “I think once you see the Tom Jones triptych and the fake Warhols go up, what Welsh woman wouldn't have a security system like that that involved Tom Jones? It's just natural.”
Zeta-Jones is having a blast — literally and figuratively — as Jackie Price, a woman who has been living an idyllic existence for decades as an art dealer. She has ostensibly managed to move on from her past as an international drugs smuggler.
But she discovers the Seven Demons, a squad of the world’s most terrifying hitmen, have been hired to kill her. Assuming an enemy from her dodgy past is behind it, she revisits her criminal muscle memory and embarks on a plan: to take down the Demons one by one before they kill her. The Prime Video series is adapted from a hit novel.
“I was given a great book called with the central character being a man called Jack. Peter [co-creator Peter Lawson] said: ‘Look at this as if Jack was Jackie’, and I did. That’s very interesting, a woman in a man's world in a dangerous, dubious world, trying to backtrack into another little less dubious world, and then thinks her past has come back to haunt her, and seven assassins are after her.”
It was Zeta-Jones’s initial idea to lean into her Welsh heritage in the telling of the story. “I said to our writers: ‘I really want to play her Welsh. I think it would be grounding. People would be able to connect to this girl from Wales who wanted to make good, got on the wrong path, tried to backtrack and redeem herself a bit, and then holy crap starts to happen, and she's back.’”
It seems remarkable that Zeta-Jones, over the course of a decades-long career that began in West End theatre productions while she was still in her teens, so rarely got to lean into her own background. “It alleviated a lot of angst of trying to get the accent right,” says the actress, who has successfully played dozens of roles in US and English accents. “I knew Jackie Price so well, I could go in any direction, and I wouldn't have known her if she wasn't Welsh. I wish I'd done it earlier in my career, but you save it for something that you really believe in.”
In the series, a cast of up-for-it sparring partners include English actor Daniel Ings ( ) who plays Jackie’s straight-laced business associate and long-time crush.
“I was excited by the premise, and I'm a fan of pulpy capers,” says Ings. “I thought from the concept, it would be fun. It was really the tone of it that drew me in. There was something about the very British, absurdly comic nature of the sense of humour which Catherine brings to it so brilliantly as well. The clash of those styles for me was the big draw. We’ve got so many great actors in there who are able to make the comedy sing.”
Zeta-Jones, too, embraced the opportunity to work with her co-star in a show that blends comedy and gritty mayhem. “He riffs like nobody else. All my reactions to when he comes up with all this stuff are real because it's the first time I've ever heard it. Like, what did you just say? What?! Memorable moments that were created on the day. As actors, that's what it's all about.”
Catherine Zeta-Jones was already a stage star when she landed a pivotal role in hit TV series Relocating to Los Angeles, she established herself in hit roles that included action movie heist film and Steven Soderbergh’s classic examination of the drugs trade, An Oscar win would follow for revisiting her musical roots as Velma Kelly in the musical In 2000, she married fellow actor and movie star Michael Douglas.
In recent years, she has spent several months filming on location in Ireland while playing Morticia Addams in , which has been a huge global hit for Netflix.
It has given Zeta-Jones the opportunity to lean into the Irish — and Cork — roots she has always embraced. Her grandmother and namesake’s family was originally from Cork city.
“My nana was one of eight, and she was the only one born in Swansea,” says Zeta-Jones, who has visited the Rebel County. “I feel very Irish. Kathleen O'Callaghan was my nana — actually, it's Catherine on her birth certificate, but everyone called her Kathleen. You don't get more Irish than that.”
Though born and raised in Wales, Zeta-Jones has long felt a strong affiliation with this part of the world. “I always feel, and not just from doing Wednesday where I've been seven months this year, seven months the year before last. It's not just because of being in Ireland that long. I've always felt very close to the Irish because of my nana. Even though she had a Welsh accent, she'd come up with all the Irish,” says Zeta-Jones, adding her traditions and superstitions have rubbed off on her.
“The Irish have made me so superstitious that it's actually traumatised my life,” she laughs. “There's not a day that goes by I don't think of my nana, who sits here as my guardian angel on my shoulder, reminding me: ‘Don't pass the salt. Don't wash your hair on a Friday. Don't wash your clothes on New Year's Day’.
“And look, when we play sports, if the Irish are playing and the Welsh are not, the Welsh are supporting the Irish. We are a kindred Celtic clan that happens just to have gone to a few different areas.”
- is now on Prime Video
