SP Y- F I sp ecial!

Ame a suave, lethal

superspy who sprung from the mind of Ian Fleming. A Martinicool ladykiller, sharp of suit and shot; a globe- hopping secret agent who defined the glittering, outrageous world of ’ 60s spy capers. Too easy? There’s one proviso. If your answer contains the words James or Bond you will be diced with a laser and fed to the sharks. No cheating now…

Napoleon Solo is Fleming’s other great contribution to the espionage game, brought to deadly, dapper life by Robert Vaughn in hit TV show The Man From UNCLE. Teamed with David McCallum as taciturn, Beatlemopped Soviet operative Illya Kuryakin, Solo fought the Cold War on the small screen while 007 ruled the big.

Now the mismatched agents of the United Network Command for Law and Enforcement are back, reactivated for a blockbuster mission by Guy Ritchie and Lionel Wigram, the director/ producer team behind Sherlock Holmes’ reinvention as a brawling Baker Street bohemian with an uncanny resemblance to Robert Downey Jr.

“Warner Bros came to us with a list of projects after Sherlock Holmes,” says Wigram as SFX meets the filmmaking duo in a sun- flooded Rome, suitably Euroglam setting for some of the movie’s key sequences. “We looked at Man From UNCLE and thought, ‘ Hmm, we’ve always wanted to do a spy movie. And this is interesting because instead of a solo agent – instead of Jason Bourne or James Bond or Harry Palmer, your typical lone spy – it’s two agents. There’s a story behind it – a Russian and an American teaming up. It feels like an opportunity here to do something different in the spy genre, but still do a ’ 60s spy movie, an homage to the Sean Connery James Bonds, to the Harry Palmers, to all those great movies.’”