Jim Caviezel and Ian McKellen talk 'The Prisoner' on AMC

By April MacIntyre Nov 15, 2009, 20:23 GMT

Actors Jim Caviezel and Ian McKellen star in AMC’s television miniseries, “The Prisoner,” which premieres today, Sunday, November 15.

Actors Jim Caviezel and Ian McKellen star in AMC’s television miniseries, “The Prisoner,” which premieres today, Sunday, November 15.

“The Prisoner” is a closed-ended miniseries, airing over three consecutive nights, beginning at 7 tonight on AMC.

Caviezel spoke to Monsters and Critics at the summer TCA's AMC party and shared he had never seen the original series. “I was set for another project when this happened to come up.  I got a phone call from my agent saying, ‘You need to read these this script that Ian McKellen is doing.” And just hearing ‘Ian McKellen' I was in...then reading the first two scripts for the episodes was...forget it, just phenomenal, and ironically I had talked to AMC before about another project."

Caviezel's character is Six, in this remake of the 1967 cult television series of the same name.

“The Prisoner” centers on Six, who wakes stranded in a desert with memories of a past life, but is now trapped in an alt universe of uniformity called the Village, run by dictatorial Two (Sir Ian McKellen).

The show is described as part sci-fi thriller an part existential drama, the new version uses the modern-day plague of hyper-societal surveillance and big government control as backdrop to the action.

Caviezel recently spoke to WWD and shared more of his character's mindset: “Whatever he does — his conscious or subconscious — that is all that he’s got. It’s the only truth he knows, and he’s going to hang onto it with everything in his mind.”

He added, “I remember going to the set and you’re so mentally exhausted. Sometimes to get myself ramped up, I would take a chair and ram it into my head, going, ‘Wake up now!’”

It was the level of Jim's commitment to the project that Sir Ian took to heart.  “Jim, more than most actors, knows how to behave in front of the camera...I was watching that really with awe, rather than thinking, ‘Are there any notes I can give him?’”

Their ideological and religious differences added to their on-screen chemistry.

“He’s a Catholic and I’m an atheist,” says McKellen. “It was very appropriate that he and I are so different in ages and nationality and belief system and experience, because we could be interested in each other easily and we could perhaps be equally suspicious of each other.”