The Prisoner's Dilemmas

“It’s a discussion of the relationship of the individual to society,” McKellen said. “The original Prisoner was very much dealing with the life of the individual as he might get caught up in Soviet Russia… Well, here we are 40 years on and we are living in a land where people accept without question being fingerprinted, having their eyes registered at airports, taking off their clothes at the airport, opening up their luggage, not being allowed to do this, not being allowed to do that, photographed in the streets by cameras that are put up by you’re never quite sure who. All this adds up to a society that perhaps isn’t quite as democratic and careful about the freedom of the individual as we would like.”

Caviezel echoes this point. “It’s a cautionary tale,” he said. “[Life] is becoming so impersonal. When you see people on the phone at dinnertime, they aren’t interacting with people anymore. They are interacting with their cellphones; there’s no looking, no conversation... Everyone’s kind of a number already.”

But the push and pull of those issues placed a huge weight on the shoulders of Caviezel, who had to keep track of his character’s central motivations all while negotiating a constantly shifting psychological landscape. “I think it’s really the second hardest thing I’ve ever done, and the hardest thing psychologically that I’ve done,” said Caviezel, who starred as Jesus Christ in Mel Gibson’s controversial opus Passion of the Christ back in 2004.

In the original version of The Prisoner, the role of the tyrannical Number Two was played by several actors (most notably Leo McKern), offering up a further Kafkaesque sensation to the battle between Six and Two. Here, McKellen plays Two, Six’s iron-fisted adversary, across all six hours as the miniseries explores his character in a way unseen in the original.

“I think our Number Two has a more central part to play in this story,” said McKellen. “You see him on duty and off duty and you see his backstage story. He’s very much his own person, I think, but he shares the same wry sense of humor of the original [series] and he has a manner that is meant to put other people at their ease. Whether it does or it doesn’t is another matter.”

Like Number Two, The Village itself is dizzily disorienting. Whereas the first Prisoner set its Village in a sort of Mediterranean beach town (filmed in Portmeirion, North Wales), this new version was shot over 18 weeks in the middle of the desert in Namibia, which itself boasts a strange mix of architectural styles.

“I think the locations chosen for the Village were very apt because this is a quirky place, an odd place,” said McKellen. “The architecture in Swakopmund where we filmed in Namibia is highly individualistic and yet you sort of feel like you’ve been there before, which isn’t a bad feeling to have when you are viewing The Prisoner… The oddness of it was very appropriate.”