By Hannah Powling
We highly recommend you get yourself down to the cinema and see The Man From U.N.C.L.E. as it is out in cinemas today!
It is seriously not one to miss out on, and certainly makes our top list of movies this year.
To celebrate, we have cast interviews from the main characters from the movie, and what it was like being involved in the re-make of the classic series. So take a seat, have a read of what the cast have to say about what it was really like being on set for an incredible film, and go get excited to finally be able to go and watch it. Hurrah!
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HENRY CAVILL (Napoleon Solo) & ARMIE HAMMER (Illya Kuryakin)
QUESTION: The Man from U.N.C.L.E. is inspired by the ‘60s TV series, which aired before you guys were born. Even though you’re telling a whole new story, were there any aspects of the original series you wanted to acknowledge or pay homage to?
ARMIE HAMMER: Yes and no. I’d say, anytime you approach a property that’s been done before and has people who really enjoy it or remember it nostalgically, you want to be careful. You want to tread lightly because you want to make those people happy. What we’re doing with this one is aiming to make those people happy, but also packaging it in a way that if you don’t have the past experience of watching it as a kid or anything like that, you can still go to this movie and understand what’s going on and appreciate the characters, whether or not you know who Mr. Waverly [Hugh Grant’s character].
QUESTION: Henry, you’re English but playing an American spy. Can you talk about how you shaped your American accent for this film?
HENRY CAVILL: I think the hardest thing for me was the accent. When we started, Guy said, ‘Okay, I want something a bit like Clark Gable, but not Clark Gable.’ And I said, ‘Okay, cool.’ So I sat down with Andrew Jack, our dialect coach, and he ran me through some Clark Gable stuff. We worked on it. We kind of got it down, and then we started shooting. And Guy kept on saying, ‘Okay, no, that word sounds wrong. Come listen to it.’ I say, ‘Yeah, okay, it sounds weird. And what’s weird about it?’ He says, ‘It just sounds too English,’ or ‘That one sounds too American.’ So we had to try and finesse it in different ways and eventually, a quarter way through the movie, it became an affected American accent, which was transatlantic and dated. And that’s why Napoleon sounds the way he sounds now.
QUESTION: Did either of you go back and watch The Man from U.N.C.L.E. TV series?
ARMIE HAMMER: I did watch the original series. I didn’t necessarily do it to learn any parts because David McCallum played the part of Illya Kuryakin, and he did a great job. But it was a very specific role at a very specific time for a very specific show, which is very different from the movie that we’re making now.
QUESTION: There’s a lot of action in this movie as well. The car chase that opens the film has a balletic quality, but when your characters finally meet and fight it out in the bathroom, it’s quite gritty. How was it for you as actors to handle the physicality of your roles?
HENRY CAVILL: I think that the real physicality came with Armie. The fight, despite it looking very rough, was very short. It didn’t take long to shoot, and it wasn’t very complicated. It didn’t require much in the way of fitness, either.
ARMIE HAMMER: It’s maybe fifteen seconds of fighting. It’s quick.
HENRY CAVILL: Yeah, but Armie had to run for three days straight, chasing that bloody car. [Laughs] He had to be fit for that.
ARMIE HAMMER: I’ve had better days. And I’m not the one who’s that physically fit. Henry is Superman; he’s sitting in the car, relaxing. And I’m out there, sweating, running, ‘Oh, Guy, you’ve got the wrong guy for this job.’ [Laughs]
QUESTION: Watching the movie, it looks like all of you had a lot of fun making it. What was the atmosphere like on-set?
HENRY CAVILL: It was fantastic. Most enjoyable movie I’ve worked on. Most fun. We all walked away as friends. We’ll come see each other again, as friends. It’s hard to say more, really. It was just relaxed.
ARMIE HAMMER: None of us got a fight … which is rare for a bunch of actors.
QUESTION: You play a very casual, sophisticated guy, compared to Superman. What’s it like to have such a change in mindset between characters?
HENRY CAVILL: It’s the joy of being an actor. You get to play these different roles, and then see yourself in these sort of imaginary characters. It’s fun. I wouldn’t want to play the same character over and over again forever. You’ve got to mix it up, and break it up. Otherwise it just gets a bit boring. And as I said, Napoleon is really fun to play. And as much as Superman is a very stoic character, it’s also very cool to be Superman. He’s got superpowers, and he does some pretty wild stuff. It is fun to switch and change.
QUESTION: You’ve both have a diverse filmography, but are there any kind of movies that would be an ideal future project for you?
HENRY CAVILL: I think probably just a great range of different movies.
ARMIE HAMMER: And to just keep working.
HENRY CAVILL: Yeah. And just to have consistent work. I mean, Armie’s now got a full-fledged family.
ARMIE HAMMER: Diapers are expensive.
HENRY CAVILL: He’s got school to pay for one day.
ARMIE HAMMER: Think about that. [Laughs] I’m going to go lay down.
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ALICIA VIKANDER (Gaby Teller) & ELIZABETH DEBICKI (Victoria Vinciguerra)
QUESTION: This movie looks like it was so much fun to make. What was it like on set for the four of you in the core cast? ELIZABETH DEBICKI: For me, it was a different experience from what it was like on-set to what it was like off-set. Off-set, we had a marvelous time together. We were in these fabulous locations, and we had so much fun together, actually. It was such a pleasure. It’s often that when you start a job, where you’re working on something, your social life kind of disappears.
ALICIA VIKANDER: It’s very anti-social.
ELIZABETH DEBICKI: The opposite, really.
QUESTION: And here, you’ve all become friends.
ALICIA VIKANDER: Yeah. We went out each night to different restaurants. We had an Italian, Luca Calvani, in the cast. We made a list of things that we just ticked off each day, restaurants and places to see.
ELIZABETH DEBICKI: It was so lovely. And, now, it’s actually just so lovely to see everybody again. Most of my scenes are with Henry. But being the villain, it’s a slightly anti-social thing, and I felt very, very much in a bubble – my own evil bubble. I also spent a lot of the time, weirdly, on my own. Perhaps it was a reflection of what it was like, psychologically, to play Victoria. I felt very removed, so my experience on-set was different, too. Alicia had many scenes with Henry and Armie, and they had to function together in order to obtain the thing they were trying to do. Victoria is really on her own little nasty tangents, and I felt very much removed from people.
QUESTION: What was the most challenging in terms of the action for you?
ALICIA VIKANDER: We both actually come from a physical background. We danced, and so I really enjoy the physical aspects of any character that I take on. And then doing action – a high level of action – you get to try things that you wouldn’t ever normally do. To be in a harness and throw yourself off of a building was just a lot of fun. I don’t even drive a car myself, but to sit behind a steering wheel and then actually pull all the wires through the car, and there’s a [stunt driver] in this tiny cage – it’s a funny picture, and I think I still have it on my computer. He actually drove the car for me. But people asked me after the first take, ‘How are you? Are you fine? Was it scary?’ I hadn’t even thought of the fact that I was in the car. So, actually, it was quite dangerous, all those little alleys. But, yeah, I just had so much fun. I really enjoyed it.
QUESTION: Your character always looks like she’s flipping through Vanity Fair a few minutes before she’s going to take over the world.
ELIZABETH DEBICKI: She is.
QUESTION: Out of the big spy movies, was there any particular film that inspired or influenced you as you shaped Victoria?
ELIZABETH DEBICKI: I don’t know if there was a specific one. I didn’t watch that many spy films in reference to this. I’ve watched some Fellini films. I watched some De Niro films. I watched Belle de Jour. I also watched The Tenth Victim, and it’s the most unusual but fantastic film. It’s futuristic, and they run around with these big guns, and she’s got this bra on. It is kind of slightly strange and absurd. I did watch a lot of that school of Italian ‘60s cinema. I felt like that influenced me the most because as much as I did watch spy films, and watched the villains of those films, I felt like we were really creating something new.
ALICIA VIKANDER: We—without giving too much away—don’t really play spies. I think it’s more the kind of women that you’ve seen in older cinema. We all knew that it was going to be very different. Guy is so precious. He wants everyone to prepare for when you get on-set. He really just wants you to drop everything you have. ‘We have those things, so let’s find new things.’ That was a mantra that we had on-set.
ELIZABETH DEBICKI: We don’t want to label her, but Victoria is sort of a psychopath. I mean, she lacks empathy, let’s be honest. [Laughs] I think that there’s also this slightly sadistic enjoyment she gets out of what she does, and that she works the best when she’s really enjoying what she’s doing there. I think that that’s fun to watch. So Guy kind of set up an environment for me as an actor. He just wanted me to feel free, enjoy the monologue, enjoy the lines, and have her private enjoyment of the torturing she does of these poor souls. I did really enjoy playing her, and Guy really let me do that.
ALICIA VIKANDER: I love that she ends up being such a self-made woman.
ELIZABETH DEBICKI: She’s building an enterprise. So she’ll just step over dead bodies to get there. [Laughs] But like any business person, when she achieves something in a business sense, she pats herself on the back and is just sort of, ‘Onwards, it’s business.’ I always imagined her waking up and putting on her face.
ALICIA VIKANDER: She doesn’t even take it off when she goes to bed. I love that. I saw that scene, and I was thinking, ‘I love that she still has the hair and makeup on.’
QUESTION: You’ve both done period dramas and other kinds of movies. Do you have an ideal type of project you’d like to tackle next?
ALICIA VIKANDER: Something that I have no idea what it is. It’s going to surprise me, and be so different from anything I’ve done. That’s probably going to make me the most excited.
ELIZABETH DEBICKI: For me, you have a vague idea. But, actually, it’s really difficult to say because you never really know what you need to do as an actor. I’ve had this funny feeling that things find you, and it’s what you should be doing at that moment as an artist in your life. Something falls into your lap, and it’s not what you expected. And it challenges you more than something else might. You just try it out, and you’re scared of it. And that’s the kind of role that I think we both look for all the time.
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