Though committed to the premise and the politically charged setting of the TV series, director Guy Ritchie used that as a jumping off point in developing the Solo and Kuryakin characters and their back-stories for the big screen–from the broad strokes to the intimate details–in a way that was previously unexplored.
The series picked up at an unspecified mid-point in the partnership, and so the filmmakers and the actors felt free to imagine the process by which these two disparate personalities reached their personal détente.
Armie Hammer, who had never seen the show, delved into some of the classic episodes for a point of reference, while Cavill, who was equally unfamiliar with it, took the opposite approach. But each sought to make these characters entirely their own.
Cavill’s Solo
As Cavill understands the quintessentially smooth Solo, “He’s not career CIA; in fact, he’s kind of anti-establishment. He acquired his skill set dealing art and antiques on the black market after sneaking his way into post-war European high society, and was so good that no one could catch him for years. It’s something he took a great deal of pride in. But eventually he was given up by a jealous girlfriend, and the CIA, seeing the value of a man like him, offered an ultimatum: go to jail or work for us. So he ended up becoming an agent, very successfully but somewhat reluctantly. It’s better than being in jail and he can still wear natty suits.”
Hammer’s Kuryakin
By contrast, Kuryakin’s rise at the KGB was the result of years of dedication, training and single-minded effort. “He’s a classic spy,” says Hammer of the youngest agent in the organization to have attained such elite status. “He grew up in the system and rose through the ranks and he’s very by-the-book. His lifelong goal was to be a KGB operative and that’s the most important thing to him.”
What irritates Kuryakin most about the new colleague he calls The Cowboy, is the American’s cavalier attitude, his accidental credentials or his sense of entitlement. “But there is definitely friction,” Hammer confirms. “At the same time, as much as Illya looks at him as an amateur who doesn’t know what he’s doing, this Solo guy just broke into a secure facility with what looks like a paper clip, so that’s pretty impressive…”
Solo finds the Russian unrefined and unpredictable, “but in some ways they’re two sides of the same coin,” Cavill observes. “The differences in their personalities and methods are vast, but they’re on the same spectrum. And even though they’re in this because Solo and Kuryakin have no choice, they are always mindful that they have a mission and there are lives at stake, not to mention the destruction of the world, so they have to try to make their skills work together. It could end up that the team is greater than the sum of its parts.”
What they are concealing from each other is that, while their respective bosses appear to be cooperating on this one-off, the end game for each agent takes a sharp turn. Solo’s directive is to deliver Teller and/or his research to CIA headquarters in Langley, while Kuryakin’s orders lead similarly to Moscow, and neither can let anything – including their partnership – get in his way.
Gaby Teller: Alicia Vikander
First, however, there are immediate concerns. Their working relationship requires a cover, and that’s where newly sprung East Berliner Gaby Teller becomes a more hands-on participant. In order to locate her father, presumably held captive in Rome by a criminal cabal, including Gaby’s odious Uncle Rudi, she is pressed into a ruse in which Kuryakin will pose as a Russian architect and she as his loving fiancée. In Rome on holiday while her faux husband-to-be studies structural design, Gaby will reach out to Rudi for her father’s whereabouts, in view of her upcoming nuptials. Solo, meanwhile, will work a parallel angle, pretending not to know the happy couple while remaining close.
“We were fans of Alicia’s from ‘A Royal Affair,’” says Wigram, “and of course she’s gone on to so many other successes since then. “We wanted a European actress for the role, someone who could play German and had that fantastic mixture of youth and naiveté with real intelligence and strength.”
Making the transition from unpretentious garage mechanic to couture-draped arm candy isn’t easy for the straight-talking, down-to-earth young woman. “But if it will keep her this side of the Berlin Wall for the rest of her life, Gaby is game for just about anything,” says Vikander.
“I loved the fact that they made her a cool, tomboyish girl with a lot of character,” she continues. “Gaby was brought up in a man’s world and so she’s quite feisty and she knows how to stand her ground. If anything, she has a tough time relaxing and pretending she wants to be just a pretty housewife, and I think it’s partly her desire to assert her independence that causes sparks to fly between her and Illya.”
Gaby creates sparks between Kuryakin and Solo, too, but only insofar as it gives them more to clash over, starting with a comical scene in which they try to one-up each other with their designer savvy while helping Gaby select her mod wardrobe…perhaps causing her to wonder if navigating Armageddon might be the easiest part of this mission.
There is serious work ahead, as the trio quickly adopt their undercover personas and prepare to take on their dangerous adversaries. Uncle Rudi, a diehard Nazi, is in league with the über-wealthy but morally bankrupt power couple Alexander and Victoria Vinciguerra. Together, they are attempting to coerce his brother-in-law, Udo Teller, into revealing his revolutionary method of uranium enrichment. It’s a process that will make atomic bombs far quicker and easier to assemble, and sell to the highest bidder.
Victoria: Elizabeth Debicki
Debicki plays Victoria, an ambitious, stunning, ice blonde from hardscrabble beginnings who married a wealthy Italian playboy long on looks but little else. “He isn’t exactly the brains of the operation,” Debicki admits. “He likes fast cars and women, and that’s fine with Victoria because she can sit behind the desk and run the show, which is what she’s always wanted. She’s a self-created, enterprising woman and quite a social climber.”
Says Wigram, “Elizabeth was phenomenal in ‘The Great Gatsby’; she really stood out in a fantastic cast and so when her name came up, Guy and I felt it was an inspired and obvious choice. She did a reading that was sensational, plus, her look reminded us of a young Catherine Deneuve, which was perfect for that period.”
Debicki, an Australian portraying a woman from Liverpool but with a deliberate clipped RP [Standard English] accent, notes, “So few of us are playing our nationalities.” Indeed, Cavill, a Brit, plays American; Hammer, an American, plays Russian; and Vikander, a Swede, plays German, all of which just added to the international air of the production, in concert with the various locations in England and Italy where they filmed.
Victoria’s Husband: Alexander
Making his starring English-language feature debut as the handsome race car driver is Italian Luca Calvani. Calling him “a new discovery for worldwide audiences, Wigram comments, “Luca is the epitome of what we had in mind. He gives Alexander just the right air of sinister glamour that makes him credible and, at the same time, so much fun.”
“Alexander believes he’s found the perfect trophy wife, which is funny because he ends up being the trophy husband in a way, as the financier of Victoria’s evil schemes,” says Calvani. “But his ego is such that he thinks he is somewhat still in charge.”
“They’re both fantastic roles,” says Debicki. “The Vinciguerras are fabulously dressed, fabulously evil people, and they have a very open marriage. Very sixties.”
Meanwhile, as all this intrigue unfolds, higher-ups are keeping watch from their respective vantage points. One is Napoleon Solo’s CIA boss, Sanders, played by Jared Harris, happily reuniting with Ritchie and Wigram following his turn as the legendary villain Moriarty in “Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows.”
Tribute to George Sanders
In a nod to cinephiles, the character is named after classic star George Sanders, who portrayed “The Saint” and was a spy in many other movies.
Says Harris, “Sanders is having a bit of a hard time with this independent, somewhat insolent agent who is also, of course, tremendously talented. Perhaps consequently, he’s sort of bad-tempered and grumpy. He lives in a gray world but deals in absolutes and he sees things in terms of ‘It’s the United States, first and foremost.’”
Fresh off four seasons of the AMC period drama “Mad Men,” Harris was already steeped in all things ‘60s. Welcoming the chance to revisit another facet of the era, he says, “It was a good script, tight, and with a sense of humor.”
Hugh Grant
Cast as the debonair and unflappable Waverly, the only other familiar character from the series apart from Solo and Kuryakin, Grant also warmed to the script. With characteristic humor, he says, “I’ve always liked Guy’s films and thought they were quite hip, and I’m not sure I’ve ever done anything even remotely hip, so that was part of the appeal. Plus, I have an uncle who was a spy and I’ve always been fascinated by that world, so I thought there might be a little fun to be had. We were never allowed to mention the fact that he was a spy – he was just officially in the Navy – but we all knew.”
Waverly displays the most unassuming attitude and introduces himself with a handshake and a single name, despite the fact that he turns out to be a significant power broker – the breadth of which isn’t fully realized until much later.
“I imagine he’s a rather smooth but probably quite scary top British spy,” the actor speculates. “Like a lot of them, he likely comes from a naval background. I believe he’s done his share of fighting and quite enjoyed it, but now he’s a man in very nice suits outsmarting the people behind the Iron Curtain and perhaps outsmarting the American CIA as well, because there was always that rivalry and there’s a touch of that, too, in the film.”
Siberian-born Misha Kuznetsov is Sanders’ cagey KGB counterpart, Oleg; German actor Christian Berkel is Udo Teller, a brilliant mind caught in a situation from which even he cannot calculate an escape; and Sylvester Groth is Rudi, an inveterate Nazi as devoted to his cause as he is to his twisted hobbies. In an interesting link to the film, Groth was born in East Germany and ultimately defected to the West.
Plot
Henry Cavill stars as Napoleon Solo opposite Armie Hammer as Illya Kuryakin in director Guy Ritchie’s action adventure “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.,” a new take on the popular 1960s television series.
Set against the backdrop of the early 1960s, at the height of the Cold War, “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” centers on CIA agent Solo and KGB agent Kuryakin. Forced to put aside longstanding hostilities, the two team up on a joint mission to stop a mysterious international criminal organization, which is bent on destabilizing the fragile balance of power through the proliferation of nuclear weapons and technology.
The duo’s only lead is the daughter of a vanished German scientist, who is the key to infiltrating the criminal organization, and they must race against time to find him and prevent a worldwide catastrophe.
“The Man from U.N.C.L.E” also stars Alicia Vikander (“Ex Machina”), Elizabeth Debicki (“The Great Gatsby”), Jared Harris (“Sherlock Holmes: a Game of Shadows”), and Hugh Grant as Waverly.
The screenplay was written by Guy Ritchie and Lionel Wigram, who previously collaborated on re-imagining the classic detective Sherlock Holmes in two hit films.
The story is by Jeff Kleeman & David Campbell Wilson and Guy Ritchie & Lionel Wigram, based on the TV series “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.”
Credits
John Davis (“Chronicle”), Steve Clark-Hall (“RocknRolla,” the “Sherlock Holmes” films), Lionel Wigram, and Guy Ritchie produced the film, with David Dobkin serving as executive producer.
Ritchie’s creative team included two-time Oscar-nominated director of photography John Mathieson (“The Phantom of the Opera,” “Gladiator”), production designer Oliver Scholl (“Jumper,” “Edge of Tomorrow”), editor James Herbert (the “Sherlock Holmes” films, “Edge of Tomorrow”), Oscar-nominated costume designer Joanna Johnston (“Lincoln”), and composer Daniel Pemberton (“The Counselor”).
“The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” will be shown in IMAX in select theaters.
A Warner presentation, a Ritchie/Wigram Production, a Davis Entertainment Production, a Guy Ritchie Film, “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” will be distributed worldwide by Warner Bros. Pictures.
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