Ridley Scott is heading to the Village.
According to Deadline, the Bladerunner director is currently in talks with universal to direct their long in development adaptation of The Prisoner, the 1960s thriller television series. The series starred Patrick McGoohan as a spy who following his angry resignation from the service is abducted to a place known only as the Village. Stripped of his name and assigned only a number, 6, the former spy struggles to determine who is captors are as well as try to escape. The show often bordered on the surreal and its revolutionary tone appealed to counterculture audiences of the time. It continues to have a cult following today.
Reviving The Prisoner has been an ongoing concern for some time now. An earlier attempt to bring the film to the big screen morphed into a 2009 television miniseries with Jim Caviezel in the role of Number Six aired on AMC and Britain’s ITV. More recently Christopher McQuarrie took a stab at writing a new screenplay for a film version. Reportedly, The Departed screenwriter William Monahan is responsible for the most recent draft at the studio.
Scott is currently prepping to shoot Alien: Covenant, but he doesn’t have a project set for when he wraps that film. Depending on how happy he is with the shape of Monahan’s script, The Prisoner could conceivably take that spot.
As to who could take McGoohans’ place in the role of Number Six, it is hard to say. McGoohan helped create the show and much of the power in his performance comes from the fact that so much of the character’s worldview comes directly from the actor. Also, McGoohan was assisted in the fact that he was just coming off the highly popular series Secret Agent and many viewers viewed Number Six as a continuation of his Secret Agent character of John Drake. With that in mind, it suggests that the perfect candidate for reviving the role on the big screen could perhaps be our current James Bond, Daniel Craig? We’ll see.
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