ITV1 has confirmed that Sir Ian McKellen and Jim Caviezel will star in the network’s reinvention of the 1960s thriller, The Prisoner, to be broadcast next year. Caviezel, who shot to fame playing the role of the idealist private Witt in The Thin Red Line, has been cast in the Patrick McGoohan role as Number Six, the hero who finds himself trapped in a mysterious and surreal place known as The Village, with no memory of how he arrived.McKellen, who is best known globally for playing Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy, will take the role of Number Two, the sinister head of The Village. ITV Productions is co-producing the six-part series with Granada International and AMC, the U.S. cable network behind the critically acclaimed Mad Men, with a worldwide premiere slated for 2009.
The Prisoner is, I reckon, one of the finest TV series ever made, but it owed much of its power to its almost perfect evocation of its time and place, a sort of Blow-Up meets Syd Barrett meets James Bond (or, I suppose, Danger Man). This new version, by contrast, will, apparently, “reflect 21st century concerns and anxieties”. Interesting…